Cody Taylor

blackbearnh writes “Jeff Holden spent a decade at Amazon, where he was involved as Senior Vice President of Consumer Websites with the recommendation engine, Amazon Prime, and the product review system. He’s left now, and has started Pelago, a company that wants to help mobile users turn their lives into stories they can share on the web. Among the interesting effects he discusses in this interview for O’Reilly Radar is that users of their product, Whrrl, have talked about changing their lives to make more interesting stories. Holden also talks about some of the work he did at Amazon, privacy issues that arise when social networking starts to become ubiquitous, and why he thinks the Apple App Store review system is seriously broken. ‘One of the things that happens with an iPhone is when you uninstall an app, it asks you to rate it. And it defaults to one-star. … The problem is … there’s no kind of qualification. Anybody just downloads it and checks it out or doesn’t check it out, right? And I think a number of people run it and they see that you have to sign in and they just delete it. And you get a one-star rating out of those experiences.'”

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Counterfeiters have moved from selling cracked iTunes gift codes to trying to draw iPhone developers into a scam to defraud Apple of thousands of dollars. Apple may need to look into making its codes harder to crack sooner than later.

waderoush writes “At the CHI 2009 conference, which wrapped up yesterday in Boston, Microsoft researchers showed off two radical prototypes that push the boundaries of user interfaces. One was a ‘pseudo-transparent’ iPhone-like device called nanoTouch, which has a trackpad on the back rather than a traditional touch screen and gives visual feedback in the form of a simulated image of the user’s finger (the effect is like looking straight through the device). The other was a folding dual-screen device called Codex that can switch automatically between landscape, portrait, collaborative, or competitive modes depending on its ‘posture’ or orientation. If Microsoft doesn’t build such devices itself, ‘somebody else will, so it’s really important to understand what the issues are,’ said researcher Ken Hinckley.”

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All the software used in this tutorial to give your snazzy iPod Touch the functionality of the iPhone is totally free. So what are you waiting for?

Recently things have taken a turn for the more ‘solid’, with bigger names coming into play and more people of the belief we’ll be seeing a new iPhone in the summer. Whether this is the oft-mooted iPhone nano or an overhaul of the current style, we just can’t tell, but here are TechRadar’s reasons to believe it’s all going down this June…

Oh Apple, what are you up to? Just like we saw right around this time last year in preparation for Apple’s new iPhone 3G and updated iPod touch, Apple is placing huge orders of NAND chips thereby threatening the supply in demand by other tier-one vendors.

The results of Piper Jaffray’s 17th bi-annual teen survey are in, showing Apple to have broadened its lead in the areas of iPod consumption and iTunes usage — both of which are nearing their saturation point — as the company moves to translate these successes to its iPhone business.

Google has just pushed out a new Gmail engine for iPhone and Android users, adding features like (some) offline access, a “floaty bar” for archive, delete, and more, and quicker access to search and tasks.

iPhone OS 3.0 is riddled with hints that video recording is on the way, and the latest is is this supposed screenshot of a revised camera app with a video toggle.

Whether you love checkers, tic-tac-toe, or even rock-paper-scissors, there are a ton of free applications you can download for hours of classic tabletop entertainment. Browse through this list and you’re almost certain to find apps that appeal to your need to play your favorite childhood games.