Living a High-Tech Life During Economic Turmoil

Flipping through the Metro this morning – the handy little 15 or so page newspapers custom designed for mass transit commuters – I once again was reminded of the teasing made by technological advancements during a time when the economy is on the brink of collapse.

With everything from oil still trading above $120-a-barrel to simple commodities like milk getting more expensive by the day – with even farmers feeling the crunch, no less – it’s getting increasingly difficult to picture myself upgrading to the iPhone 3G or even to a MacBook as my current 4 year old IBM Thinkpad sadly putters while trying to load such system intensive applications like Calculator.

So when I read (or more accurately, have wet dreams) about new televisions able to pick up high definition wireless video from any device in your home during my commute – a commute that will apparently cost 13% more by 2011 – I wince yet again at the dangers of teasing my synapses with such startling new technology.

Because at the end of the day, the economy is in the shitter and as a college student I will have no opportunity in the near future to earn the kind of income necessary to satiate my technological hunger.

I suppose I shouldn’t be too sad about it though as our country faces far worse problems, and my bitching about not being able to buy a piece of $1000 technology is kind of elitist when there are at least 406,000 unemployed folk filling out applications at Starbucks to no avail since they’re closing 600 of those, and when Starbucks starts closing it’s time to get scared. If Wal-Marts start closing, however, it’s then time to leave the country.

Dead Tech of the Day: The Hug Shirt

Welcome to Dead Tech, a little feature I’ll put on from time to time highlighting interesting tech monstrosities that fell to the swift blade of reality. The first installment is an ode to the Hug Shirt.

I actually have no idea if the Hug Shirt is Dead Tech or what has become of it since I first witnessed a demonstration of them at the Wired NextFest many moons ago, but as someone currently in a long distance relationship I can understand the need to feel physical connection with your partner. With the emergence of the Internet and cell phones it has become even more feasible for long distance relationships to emerge and prosper, and products that help such relationships last definitely have potential.

The Hug Shirt was a good idea – albeit a loosely defined version of “good” – but only as an idea.

Named one of the Best Inventions of 2006 by TIME magazine, the Hug Shirt even received interest from the U.S. Army for soldiers far from their families according to Textually, though there’s no mention of any deal or interest on parent company CuteCircuit’s news blog so odds are nothing came of that supposed interest.

The Hug Shirt worked as such: people wearing the shirt could squeeze the red portions of the Hug Shirt and that squeeze would be sensed by your cell phone via Bluetooth. A squeeze of equal force would be sent to your partner’s phone where they could accept the embrace and bask for a few seconds while the fabric squeezed around those areas.

There were a few problems that hit the well intentioned product.

1. It was ugly, though it was meant to be an undershirt more than anything else.
2. Both people had to be wearing the shirt, so basically you had to almost schedule the days you would use the Hug Shirt with your loved one. Wearing the shirt daily wouldn’t exactly be…hygienic.

That is why there are no more recent Google results for the Hug Shirt than late 2007 and probably why we won’t hear much about it. But at least we can enjoy watching some people looking goofy with these furry and hideous hug sweat shirts from Wired NextFest 2007.

Tech Tonivision: The Goal of Tech Tony

My name is Anthony Perez, the sole author of Tech Tony and publisher of the videogame site Gamer 2.0. Now that my first post is in the bag I feel as though I should do a brief introduction.

The goal of this blog is not to necessarily have a ton of traffic, make gobs of money, blah blah. I won’t even post news because I feel there’s no real point as it’d be a major headache and more a time commitment than I can make.

I simply plan to write my views and opinions on things in the web tech (web 2.0) world as well as perhaps gaming – though the majority of my gaming articles will be saved for Gamer 2.0. It’ll just be a hell of a lot of opinion and I will try to update at least once daily though I do have a hectic schedule.

MySpace iPhone App Better than Facebook’s?

Mark Hendrickson of TechCrunch posted glowing impressions yesterday of the Facebook iPhone app, declaring it “indispensable within the next few months.”

Why is it so compelling? Because it almost eliminates the need to maintain a separate contacts list on my phone. While Facebook’s web app for the iPhone was cool enough, the native app basically transforms Facebook into a mobile directory with rich information about your friends.

If you’re even semi-serious about using Facebook to keep track of your friends, you may never have to click the “Phone” icon to dial them up. Just hit the Facebook icon and move over to the “Friends” tab. You’ll see all of your Facebook friends laid out, and when you click on their names, their contact info appears in the iPhone’s customary user interface.

That’s all well and good, but Facebook forgot to add something to its iPhone application: the actual Facebook experience. It’s completely perplexing why Facebook went the route that it did. It added almost all of the Facebook communications services – “almost” because it’s without walls (figure that one out) – so you’re basically left with a glorified contacts list. The iPhone Facebook App lets you do the following

• Update your status and view your friends’ statuses
• View your profile and your friends’ profiles which includes only your e-mail, phone number, networks, jobs, birthdays, relationships status and mini-feed
• Facebook chat
• Private messaging

Want to write on a friend’s wall? No can do, guess you’ll have to jump to Safari and load up the Facebook Web App (click this link to play with the iPhone Optimized site). In fact, the iPhone Web optimized version of Facebook is everything the iPhone Facebook App should have been.

Meanwhile, MySpace – and I can’t believe I’m about to say this – absolutely demolishes Facebook’s iPhone App. Just check out the video below:

Mark’s love affair with the iPhone Facebook App is a Silicon Valley disease. Everyone there is ready to hail almost anything from the beloved Facebook and Twitter as incredible, and slow to criticize. Unless Facebook updates the App to work more like its iPhone optimized site then the company has completely dropped the ball on this one.

Sure it’s nice that you can Facebook chat (even though I never use it even on the regular Facebook), though when I’m on my phone – like most people outside of the Valley, I suppose – I use SMS to reach people. It’s instant and they don’t have to be logged into Facebook to see my message. So could someone please explain how Facebook chat is a superior mode of communication? Sure it saves texts but I have unlimited data, so it’s far more convenient for me to receive an SMS than login to Facebook. And if I were to login to an application to chat, it would be AIM anyway.

I love TechCrunch, and I love a lot of the Web 2.0 technologies, but I thank God I live in NYC so I can see these things from a better perspective. The world doesn’t run on Web 2.0 tech yet and the truth as I see it is that most of the Web 2.0 tech that is written about with such masturbatory glee won’t make much of a difference to the mass market.

That being said, I do see the opportunity for Twitter to explode. Once you have a Twitter desktop app, it’s addicting to just see what your friends are up to.