All Things Digital

This is a key-shaped USB device that launches a specific Web site when plugged into a computer. It allows a user on a shared computer (i.e., at the office or in the home) to connect to a Web site and not have to worry about leaving any trace of activity. Think: no more annoying telltales from video-game or teen celebrity sites. Also, no worries about browsing porn or other adult-content destinations, because the QiGO can link users to age-appropriate sites without anyone else being able to see the content accidentally or monitor what had been accessed.

Everything goes on the keylike device’s memory, billed as being smart (for connecting users to a predetermined online destination), secure (for linking users to predetermined, private content) and dynamic (because an infinite amount of content can be unlocked without taxing the memory of the QiGO device).

“Our goal was to make the Internet tangible and intuitive while eliminating user names, passwords and PINs,” said Dan Klitsner, co-founder of QiGO.

QiGO technology has already been used with Konami’s online trading-card game, Yu-Gi-Oh, as well as Hasbro’s Net Jet online game system. It has also been licensed to Fisher Price for use in preschool toys that will connect children to gated versions of existing children’s Web sites.

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Remember Harmony? It was a RealNetworks utility that Real hoped would enable it to infiltrate Apple’s music empire by allowing consumers to play songs purchased at Real’s download store on the iPod. And it got the company in a lot of trouble with Apple.

That episode, and Real’s penchant for developing tech that annoys the heck out of other businesses, comes to mind today as RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser takes the stage to demo RealPlayer 11, which enables one-click downloading of online videos from thousands of Web sites, as well as the ability to organize them and even burn them to DVD and CD.

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In a demo this afternoon, Walt and Kara got a tour of a hand-held microcomputer, the LiveScribe Smartpen. This is another in a string of attempts, Walt notes, to add a simple computer to a penlike device that records words and can pinpoint their location in the recording when the user taps the handwritten version on a sheet of paper.

The “mobile-computing platform” (those are LiveScribe founder Jim Marggraff’s words) consists of: the Smartpen, a fountain-pen-sized computer with audio/visual feedback and memory for handwriting capture, audio recording and applications; paper with Dot Positioning System technology that creates interactive documents using plain paper printed with microdots; software applications, including audio/ink capture, handwriting recognition and Internet connectivity; and tools for consumers and developers to create, publish and share new applications and content online. You can even store your notes directly from the device into a computer.

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In addition to being the Hawaiian word for thank you, Mahalo may have also been the last published word of Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. But don’t tell that to Internet entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, who has given the name to his latest effort, a curated (he calls it “human-powered”) search service.

The humans who do the curating, according to Calacanis, will be based in the U.S. Mahalo will one-up Google because of these people, he claims. If, for instance, Martha Stewart wants to find out why she’s not higher in the results for “cake,” she can speak to a person about it, not an algorithm.

Better still, Calacanis says, the service will be interactive. “We’re completing the search results about 60%, then we’re relying on users for feedback.” After the service is built out, it will be a matter of simple maintenance, refining the results. The revenue model, he says, will be advertising, of the nonobtrusive variety.

“Are you doing this to flip it?” Walt asks.

“No, that was the last company,” Calacanis deadpans.

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With his appearance today at D: All Things Digital, Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer will unveil Surface, the first in the company’s new category of surface-computing products that it has touted as “breaking down traditional barriers between people and technology.” Surface has a 30-inch display that can recognize physical objects. It allows, according to Microsoft, “hands-on, direct control of content such as photos, music and maps. … through natural gestures, touch and physical objects.” And it looks like it would make a hell of an air hockey table and perhaps even a Ms. Pacman game.

Surface can also recognize objects embedded with identification tags similar to bar codes. For instance, according to Microsoft, customers could set a wine glass on Surface and a restaurant could provide them with information about the wine, pictures of the vineyard it came from and suggested pairings with food on the menu. Surface, as Microsoft sums it up, brings an “opportunity to create technology that would bridge the physical and virtual worlds.”

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