Technology has been used to help golfers improve their game for quite awhile now. We’ve covered some apps before, and a high tech glove, and now the folks at PING have a new way to improve your putting. Called the iPING Putter App, this app measures your stroke type, impact angle, and tempo which you can use to compare with your friends and some pre-entered golfing pros.

The app aims to help users improve the consistencies of their putts, which in turn will make users’ putting strokes more reliable when playing on the golf course. The iPING Putter App will be available for free on the Apple App Store on June 20th, but the cradle for you to attach it to your putter is available separately. Video demonstration of the app after the break:

iPING Putter App improves your putting, By Ubergizmo. Top Stories : Atrix Review, Dell Streak 7 Review,

This isn’t the first time Windows has been invited to the AirPlay party, but Thomas Pleasance’s AirPlay for Windows Media Center addin seems to already be one of the smoother combinations we’ve seen and it’s still in beta. Unsurprisingly, it does what the name says, so after installing Apple’s Bonjour service and the free client on your Media Center PC you should be able to stream video or pictures to it (there’s no support for music yet) from an iPad or iPhone with a simple click. The Digital Lifestyle has already gotten a quick hands-on with the app and got it working seamlessly as seen above, check that out for more details or hit the source link to download the necessary software to make it all work.

AirPlay for Windows Media Center does exactly what you’re thinking it does originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 24 May 2011 03:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Acoustic Research’s dock has the ability to dock your iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch through the 30-pin proprietary Apple port. Once plugged in, your iOS device can play music through the docks’ two speakers. While connected to the dock, the device is also charged while playing music. If you’re using the dock to watch movies, it even has an easily rotated base that can hold your iPad in landscape mode.

It also comes with a 3.5mm audio input port for those times when you don’t have your iOS device with you or you have a non-iPod using friend who wants to share his/her music on your speakers. The ARS20i also functions as an alarm clock and a digital FM radio when used standalone. It is available now from Amazon for $77.74 (normal price $79.99).

Acoustic Research ARS20i: a dock for your iOS device, By Ubergizmo. Top Stories : Galaxy Tab 8.9 Preview, HTC Thunderbolt Review,

Apple's CEO Steve Jobs videoconferences with senior designer Jonathan Ive, in a demonstration at WWDC 2010. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Slow and meticulous is how Apple generally approaches product design, and it’s also how it handles crisis management. The company doesn’t rush, so that it can get things right the first time.

But when it comes to responding to crises, being slow hasn’t always been the best idea for Apple.

Macworld editorial director Jason Snell published a peculiar but intriguing piece Friday, analyzing how Apple handles crisis management. He notes that the way Apple responds has a clear pattern: The company takes its time to react with care and with a lot of detail. This is illustrated by the past week’s iPhone location-collection controversy and last year’s “Antennagate” debacle.

This technique seems idiosyncratic to some crisis-management experts, who believe companies should respond much faster in the event of a crisis.

“We live in a world that’s measured in seconds,” said Michael Robinson, senior VP with Levick Strategic Communications, a firm that helps companies deal with public relations emergencies, in an interview with Computerworld. “Companies grow and go away in that time. If it takes a week, it might as well take a month.””

Apple isn’t the only big corporation that takes its sweet time to respond to concerns. Sony, too, took over a week to acknowledge and publicize a massive security breach that resulted in hackers potentially stealing personal information, including credit card data, from millions of PlayStation Network customer accounts.

Data researchers revealed April 20 that an unprotected file inside iOS devices stores location data, dating as far back as 10 months. The file stores information about nearby cell towers and Wi-Fi access points, leaving a digital trail of your general whereabouts.

Apple waited an entire week to publish its response to the location-data collection discussion in the form of a Q&A, explaining that the company had made some mistakes. And when asked why, Steve Jobs defended the company’s decision to wait:

“By the time we had figured this all out, it took a few days,” Jobs told All Things Digital. “Then writing it up and trying to make it intelligible when this is a very high-tech topic took a few days. And here we are less than a week later.”

During last year’s iPhone 4 antenna controversy, in which some customers reported that holding the iPhone in a very natural way caused signal loss, Jobs made a similar statement to explain Apple’s slow response.

“We heard about [reception problems] 22 days ago and have been working our butts off. It’s not like we’ve had our heads in the sand for three months,” he said during a press conference.

In both these scenarios, Apple’s slow and calculated response to crises seemed to address the issues effectively, although later than some critics would have liked.

Snell argues that in the case of Antennagate, Apple’s idiosyncratic crisis management didn’t seem to do Apple any harm, as shown by skyrocketing sales of the iPhone 4 despite the controversy. Therefore Apple will probably go unharmed with the location-data fiasco, too.

“I’m not convinced that Apple’s been given any reason to believe that its approach to crisis management is wrong,” Snell writes.

But it’s worth noting that in another major “crisis,” Apple’s slow-to-respond M.O. didn’t bode well.

How Apple Fumbled ‘MobileMess’

Think back to the debut of MobileMe, Apple’s $100-per-year online service for e-mails, calendars and contacts.

MobileMe was riddled with bugs and glitches when it launched in 2008. Then things got worse. There was an outage that left 1 percent of MobileMe customers (20,000 people) without e-mail for weeks. Some reported temporarily losing thousands of their e-mail messages due to the glitch.

Even if that was just a small portion of MobileMe customers, an e-mail outage is a serious problem, especially when it’s a paid service. You could miss important notes related to job offers, family members and friends.

During the MobileMe debacle, which critics dubbed “MobileMess,” Apple didn’t respond to queries from press. And for customers, it issued a vague statement acknowledging the problem, but gave no clear estimate of when the problem would be fixed.

It was the same slow and cautious crisis-management technique that we saw again this week, but with a different outcome.

Throughout the weeks of e-mail blackout, there weren’t regular updates assuring customers of what was happening, each step of the way. The only status update from Apple was, “We understand this is a serious issue and apologize for this service interruption. We are working hard to restore your service.”

But by the time the problem was fixed, it was too late. MobileMe’s brand was damaged forever. And the consensus among technology writers, and even Steve Jobs, was that MobileMe was “not up to Apple’s standards.”

“It’s amazing that Apple doesn’t recognize this situation,” New York Times columnist David Pogue wrote on the “MobileMess” debacle in 2008:

This is an airplane that’s stuck on the runway for hours with no food or working bathroom. And the pilot doesn’t come on the P.A. system to tell the customers what the problem is, what’s being done to fix it, how much longer they might be stuck, and how he empathizes with their plight. Instead, he comes on once every three hours to repeat the same thing: “We apologize for the inconvenience.”

The difference between MobileMe and the location controversy? In the case of MobileMe, customers affected by early bugs and the e-mail outage were the ones demanding answers. They didn’t get the attention they needed from Apple, and for many, MobileMe could no longer be trusted.

In the case of the location-collection controversy, it was mostly the media and some senators demanding transparency from Apple, not thousands of customers complaining, and so, Apple will probably continue selling millions of iPhones anyway.

Customers Deserve a Quicker Response

While Apple’s late response to the location controversy was indeed effective, I’m not convinced this was the best way to handle the situation. Customers, not just journalists, deserve to have an idea of what’s going on with their products sooner.

If its explanation is to be fully believed, Apple had to know that it was a mistake to store a year’s worth of geodata on iPhones the minute it took a look at the file. It could have defused the situation sooner by acknowledging that there was an error, while promising that it was working on a full explanation and a fix to come later.

Apple even had a prefabricated response waiting for it. When asked, Apple could have pointed journalists to a letter its general counsel penned almost one year ago disclosing the iPhone’s location-data methods to Congressman Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts). Most of what appeared in Apple’s Q&A this week was already buried inside that year-old legal letter.

Finally, the only reason the location issue ever came to light was that Apple’s security team simply didn’t respond to questions from the two data scientists who originally published a story on the issue: “We’ve contacted Apple’s Product Security team, but we haven’t heard back,” they wrote.

A slow and thorough response to a crisis can work for Apple, but with the location-tracking controversy, the issue could have been avoided altogether with a single response.

As it turned out, the location-tracking issue was not an immediate or huge concern. But in the future, Apple might not be so lucky if its mistakes prove to be more serious. The company should reevaluate its crisis-management technique before it gets into another MobileMess.

In this week’s podcast, Brian X. Chen and Dylan Tweney discuss the Verizon iPhone, AT&T’s new tethering and hot-spot features, and News Corp.’s new iPad newspaper.

First up is our review of the Verizon iPhone, which really does have better coverage based on our tests. Suddenly, the iPhone is a phone, Brian says — although when you can get a signal, the AT&T iPhone has much faster data download and upload speeds.

We talk about the Verizon iPhone’s hot-spot feature: For an extra $20 per month, you can share your wireless connection with up to five devices via Wi-Fi. That compares to AT&T’s tethering option, which costs the same amount but only lets you connect one other device.

AT&T now offers a hot-spot feature too, but on an HTC 4G smartphone coming later this month. It has also improved its tethering plan by adding an extra 2GB of data.

We talk about News Corp.’s new iPad-only newspaper, The Daily. It will cost $1 per week or $40 per year. While the content is promising, the app is a little sluggish, and we have some doubts about the business model.

Finally, we talk about how the internet is running out of space. The last IPv4 addresses were handed out this week, and over the next few years, we may see slowdowns and glitches as companies start transitioning to a different version of the internet’s basic protocol.

—

You can listen to the audio-only version of the show here:

Gadget Lab audio podcast #102
http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gadgetlabaudio/GadgetLabAudio0102.mp3

Or download the OGG version of Gadget Lab podcast #102.

Like the show? You can also get the Gadget Lab video podcast via iTunes, or if you don’t want to be distracted by our unholy on-camera talent, subscribe to the Gadget Lab audio podcast. Prefer RSS? You can subscribe to the Gadget Lab video or audio podcast feeds

Rovio CEO Mikael Hed (left) and Rovio "Mighty Eagle" Peter Vesterbacka (right) have cracked the App Store code. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Editor’s note: This article is part of a series of profiles about hit apps and the successful programmers behind them.

See Also:

How Flipboard Turned Web Noise Into iPad Gold

You can’t go a day without hearing someone mention Angry Birds.

Fans on Twitter share pictures of cakes they decorated with the Angry Birds characters. On YouTube, parents post videos of their kids playing Angry Birds in real life. Even talk show hosts like Conan O’Brien can’t resist cracking a joke about the game every night.

The game’s creator Rovio on Friday announced a new game, Angry Birds Rio, based on a movie made by Fox. (See teaser images below.)

The game is so ubiquitous it’s almost obnoxious. Some tech observers previously dubbed Angry Birds the new Pac-Man, but that wasn’t enough for the game’s makers.

“What we’re doing is we’re building out the Angry Birds world,” said Peter Vesterbacka, whose business card title reads “Mighty Eagle” of Rovio. “Pac-Man is only one game. Mario is a better benchmark.”

Rovio announced a new Angry Birds game based on a movie made by Fox. The game is due out March on multiple game platforms. Image courtesy of Rovio

Angry Birds first appeared in Apple’s iPhone App Store in December 2009. Since then, the game has expanded to multiple devices, including the iPad, Android phones and the Sony PlayStation Portable, amassing over 75 million downloads to date, according to Rovio. The majority of sales comes from the App Store, where Angry Birds has consistently ranked a best seller.

Made by the creators of Ice Age, Rio will release in theaters April 15. Image courtesy of Rovio

Angry Birds accentuates the business opportunity unlocked by the iTunes App Store, Apple’s digital-distribution platform for selling third-party apps for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. Launched in summer of 2008, the App Store’s friction-free business model proved to be a new digital frontier where software programmers big and small had an opportunity to make serious money, whereas before, hobbyist coders were no match to major game studios and their colossal marketing budgets.

In the App Store, some programmers have netted hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales with clever games, software utilities and DIY social marketing. Apple recently announced that iOS customers surpassed 10 billion app downloads.

But Angry Birds was not a small-team effort, nor was its success a lucky strike. Based in Finland, the Rovio game studio that makes Angry Birds has 40 employees and expects to expand to 100 by the end of this year.

Angry Birds was actually the studio’s 52nd published game, and its 16th originally created game, according to Mikael Hed, Rovio’s CEO. He said the game’s success was carefully engineered with physics-based gameplay that made it easy to learn, while creating depth for advanced players in later stages. Add to that very cute characters and sounds, and a polished design, and you have a big hit.

If minimalism is your thing, but you’d still like a tiny bit of extra insurance for your iPhone, you’re not going to find a simpler case than the ‘Just a Loop’ which is quite literally just a black elastic loop. For ~$13 (€10) you actually get 4 of them, which can be wrapped around any of the iPhone models (it’s engineered to be completely backwards compatible) providing a simple bumper so there’s less risk of scratching when you set it down.

Oddly enough it’s from the same inventor, Konstantin Leonenko, who created the World’s Tiniest Drill from a year or so ago. But I suspect this venture could be a bit more profitable for him. Unless someone manages to crack his revolutionary manufacturing techniques for creating elastic loops, but that seems improbable.

[ Just a Loop iPhone Case ] VIA [ bookofjoe ]

20-year-old Jerome Taylor recently put on a mask, walked into a restaurant, and waved what appeared to be a small handgun while demanding money. The restaurant’s cooks immediately grabbed their knives and prepared for a fight. Then things got weirder. More »

My HTC Evo, a traveling journalist’s workhorse, got me busted in open court.

It was the first day of the Xbox modding trial in Los Angeles last week, which I was covering for Wired.com. The reason wasn’t that the phone’s ringer sounded in federal court — I’ve been in too many courtrooms to make that mistake.

Blame it on my Evo’s Wi-Fi hotspot, which prompted U.S. District Judge Philip Gutierrez to suddenly halt proceedings in the first-of-it’s kind hacking trial.

From the bench, in the afternoon on Day No. 1 of the trial, the judge asked me to rise and state my name. After seeing my hotspot (with the perhaps-suspicious ID of “gethacked”) show up on his computer at the bench, the judge demanded to know whether I was transmitting a signal.

I pleaded guilty.

He ordered me to turn it off, but allowed me to use my MacBook Pro offline for “note taking” purposes, which came in handy the following day when Judge Gutierrez went on a 30-minute tirade bagging on the prosecution’s case, which ultimately was dismissed.

Normally, one must ask permission to use a computer from the gallery. I gambled. The payout was that I learned about one of the Evo’s few flaws: Its blazing-fast, 4G Wi-Fi hotspot cannot be made invisible. Despite that flaw, and after months using an unrooted Evo, my jailbroken iPhone seems so yesterday.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m still a member of the “Cult of Mac.” My Apple fanboyishness includes an iPad, a 13-inch Macbook Pro, a 27-inch iMac, and I’m a heavy iTunes software user.

But consider:

• The Evo, carried by Sprint, is a phone that actually makes and receives clear calls.
• I can use it as a removable storage device as easily as a USB stick.
• It’s big, thick and heavy, just the way a phone should be.
• It’s a data-hog of a mini computer that surfs the internet at amazing speeds.
• The password-protected Wi-Fi signal it emits is killer, and it only takes the press of a button to turn it on.

In my Los Angeles hotel room, the Evo became my media hub last week.

I had a great Wi-Fi signal, thanks to the Evo, to which I attached my MacBook Pro and iPad. There was a crystal-clear Bluetooth connection to my cyborg-like phone earpiece and, again, the call quality was superb. And when I wasn’t on a call, the phone’s speaker was blaring Eminem.

James Merithew, Wired.com’s photo editor, laughed at the mug shot I took of defendant Matthew Crippen using my Evo. (Technically, it’s illegal to take photos in a federal courthouse, so I snapped a few shots in a hurry after hustling Crippen over to a poorly lighted corner.) But with a little touching up, the photo was presentable enough for publication. Take that, Mr. Merithew!

The only thing the Evo didn’t do for me was dispense beer.

Trust me, I had that angle covered.

We were undeniably excited about Netflix coming to the iPhone and iPad, but according to CEO Reed Hastings — who spoke on the subject during a Web 2.0 Summit panel discussion — that move has actually had little impact on the company’s business. In his mind, these results indicate that consumers just aren’t interested in streaming long-form video on mobile devices and instead prefer the experience on bigger screens. To support his conclusion, Hastings cited how Netflix integration on the Xbox 360, PS3, and Mac significantly grew its subscriber base. While we personally disagree with his judgment on mobile and grant him honorary captain obvious credentials for his bigger screen preference remarks, we’ll still entertain the possibility that Hastings may know somethings we don’t. That’s not to say the phrase correlation does not imply causation isn’t tickling the back our throat though. But what about you, reader? Are you taking advantage of the little red app on your Apple portable devices or even on your new Windows Phone 7 handset? Hit the poll to tell us what’s up.

View Poll

Netflix CEO says consumers just aren’t interested in long-form video on portable devices originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Nov 2010 04:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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