The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘kids’

It’s Tecmo Bowl, but on your Xbox 360 or PS3. And without the NFL-licensed players and teams.

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Tecmo Bowl Throwback due for Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network

The Vizit photo frame is an interesting twist on conventional photo frames.

Go here to see the original: 
Quick hands on with the Vizit cellular connected touchscreen photo frame

I’ve been thinking a lot about the world that my kids will soon live in.

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Penguin is betting on the iPad for the future of books

Apple’s hypocrisy with regard to the App Store is something I know well. Several times last year I wrote about Apple allowing apps like “Asian Boobs” and upskirt apps into the App Store while rejecting things such as satirical apps that mocked public figures. It was ridiculous. So you might think I’d be happy that Apple is now rejecting and removing sexy apps from the App Store as well. But actually, the hypocrisy is much worse now.

Problem number one is that while Apple is removing most of these sexy apps from the App Store, it’s not removing all of them. So who gets to stay? Big publishers like Sports Illustrated and Playboy. In fact, not only is Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit 2010 app not being removed, it’s being featured in the App Store. Both it and the Playboy app clearly violate the new rules of the more prudish App Store, yet they get to stay. Why?

As Apple VP of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller explained earlier to the New York Times, it’s because they’re well-known companies known for that content. Yet, he also cited women being upset about feeling degraded and parents being upset about kids having access to sexy apps as the main reason Apple is cracking down on them. The omission of the fact that parents probably also don’t want their kids downloading the Playboy app, or that some women might also find the Swimsuit app degrading is laughable.

Now, are some apps worse than others with regard to sexy content? Of course. But Apple has removed over 5,000 apps and counting under these new rules — surely some of those would likely be considered less offensive then the Playboy app. Further, this is creating the ultimate gray line when it comes to what is and what is not permissible in the App Store. For example, what if there’s a smaller publication also known for nude pictures that wants to make a lingerie app? Will Apple reject or accept that? Is there a certain circulation threshold one has to have to be considered “well-known” in Schiller’s words?

Problem number two is that Apple is breaking a golden rule: don’t take away what you’ve already given (in this case, to both to developers and users). Apple has not always allowed these sexy apps in the App Store. But at some point over the past several months they changed their minds and apps like “Asian Boobs” started getting accepted. Why did they do it? At the time, the thought was that with the new parental controls in the iPhone OS 3.0, they could leave it up to parents to decide what their children can or cannot download/use.

Apple was probably happy to let another huge rush of apps into the store, while yes, generating revenue off of them. Meanwhile, this spawned a wave of developers who were making these types of apps. Several of those developers have reached out to us over the past few days basically saying that Apple has just destroyed their businesses. Again, businesses that these people would not have created without Apple approving these apps in the first place. Apple giveth, Apple taketh away.

Problem number three is related to number two. I fail to see the reason that Apple built parental controls in to the iPhone OS if they weren’t to be used for situations like this. Why even bother? For games with violence? Please. I’m all for kids not having access to mature content if their parents are against it, but that’s exactly what these controls are made for.

So why is Apple making this big change that is pissing a lot of people off if they have this safeguard in place? Clearly, they must not trust it. But if that’s the case, why not remove the explicit content from iTunes? After all, the parental controls for apps are in the exact same place as the ones from music, movies, and TV shows.

Problem number four is perhaps my favorite one. Apple is going through all this trouble of removing these apps, and creating more work in scanning for next sexy apps to reject, when built in to every iPhone and iPod touch is not one, but two huge entry points for explicit material — and both are apps made by Apple themselves. The first, I alluded to above: iTunes. There are no shortage of films and TV shows with nudity and sexual content (along with violence and everything else) that are available on iTunes for purchase on the device. The same is true for explicit music.

But the second app is far worse: Safari. Each iPhone and iPod touch has a web browser that is more than capable of accessing any site on the web with a few clicks. This includes sites with hardcore pornography, or anything else a teenage kid can dream up. Apple is going through all this trouble to block sexy apps (which have never contained nudity, by the way, just sexy pictures), when they offer one of their own that makes it much easier to find far more sinister content.

Of course, if they removed Safari, it could well destroy the iPhone. So they’re not going to do that.

The sad truth is that while everyone can clearly see Apple’s hypocrisy here, it’s unlikely to matter. Just as with all the hoopla over the Google Voice app rejection, this too will blow over. As long as people keep voting for Apple with their pocketbooks, Apple will continue to do as it pleases, hypocrisy or not.

The lesson, I suppose, is that killer products give you carte blanche.

It took them four days, but Apple is finally explaining its surprise decision to remove nearly all “sexy” content from the App Store. Once again, the morsels of information come from Apple SVP of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller, who spoke with the New York Times for an article published earlier this evening. None of it is too surprising, but Schiller’s unconvincing explanation as to why some applications like Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit app and Playboy will be allowed to remain on the store is sure to anger plenty of developers.

So why did Apple decide to pull these sexy apps?

“It came to the point where we were getting customer complaints from women who found the content getting too degrading and objectionable, as well as parents who were upset with what their kids were able to see”

Which makes sense given the broad appeal of the iPhone, but Apple should have seen this coming, and it implemented parental controls for a reason. And then Schiller goes on to pour salt into the wounds of recently spurned developers with his explanation as to why a select few sexy applications will remain on the App Store.

“When asked about the Sports Illustrated app, Mr. Schiller said Apple took the source and intent of an app into consideration. “The difference is this is a well-known company with previously published material available broadly in a well-accepted format,” he said.”

So apparently exposed cleavage in a Playboy application is less offensive to women and parents because it’s also being printed in a magazine, or something. The decision really isn’t all that surprising, either — there’s little risk of the Playboy application trying to sneak in some extreme nudity, and with only a handful of mainstream sexy apps there’s much less clutter. Still, such favoritism sets another bad precedent for the App Store, and Schiller’s explanation just feels lame.

Of course, if you’re still looking for ’sexy’ content on your iPhone, you can still find plenty of nudity in iTunes (Apple has no problem selling R rated movies). Or you could just pop open Safari.

With all the flaws that e-book readers have, they don’t seem to be going away anytime soon. VTech , makers of fine educational electronics, are rolling out the Flip animated e-book reader, so now, your kids can get in on the action too.

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E-E-book readers for kids. The first “E” stands for educational.

A school district in Arizona has outfitted one of its school buses with a $200 mobile 3G Wi-Fi router and $60-per-month access. And guess what? Instead of punching each other and yelling all the way to school, the kids quietly tap, tap, tap away on their laptops

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Wi-Fi school bus keeps kids quiet

In China, learning spoken English is giving rise to a huge and growing market. For instance, in addition to English classes in public schools, parents send their children to about 50,000 for-profit training schools around the country, where English is the most popular subject. Instead of American Idol, on CCTV, the national government-owned TV network, they have the Star of Outlook English Talent Competition. This is possibly the largest nationwide competition in China. Last year, 400,000 students between the ages of 6 and 14 took part in it.

This year, the competition is adding a virtual twist, and a startup based in Massachusetts called 8D World is at the center of it. 8D World runs a virtual world called Wiz World Online for Chinese-speaking kids who want to learn English. In what is a huge coup for the startup, this year’s CCTV English competition will use Wiz World Online as its official training and competition platform. Wiz World will be used to screen contestants and will be promoted to millions of Chinese viewers.

Each player in Wiz World gets an avatar, but to get through the game and rack up points players need to pronounce words properly in English using a microphone. It is all software based, using speech recognition and pronunciation assessment software. The way Wiz World makes money is through subscriptions: about $20 a month or $160 a year, which is a lot in China, but less than the average $700 a year parents pay to send their kids to the training schools. 8D World also has partnerships with about 1,500 of those training school who resell Wiz World subscriptions and get a rev-share.

Students competing in the CCTV competition won’t have to pay a subscription fee in the competitions themselves, but if they want to train for the event using Wiz World they will need one. The company plans to expand its English-learning virtual world to other languages as well. Next up will be Korean, and after that it may go after Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian.

The company raised $7 million in March 2008 from Spark Capital and Gobi Partners.

The Pew Internet Project says that kids who buy their own phones are four times as likely to sext - that is send inappropriate images or texts to other kids. The sad thing is that some of these images make it into some of the 3,000 reports received by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children every week.

While I still think sexting, like rainbow parties, is an overblown phenomenon, the report, found here and embedded after the jump, polled 2,553 Millennials (18-29) and 800 adolescents between 12 and 17. The results were quite interesting.

Hello, beautiful. The Olympus PEN E-PL1 isn’t supposed to be official until tomorrow, but that didn’t stop good ol’d Engadget from posting the full press release along with all of the product shots early. Well done, boys.

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The Olympus PEN E-PL1 finds a damaged Internet tube, leaks everywhere