All Your Crab Are Belong to Us
How a bloated presentation by Sony execs became a viral video.
Sony's two-hour press conference on May 8, 2006, was a slo-mo car crash. Intended to rally geeks around the PlayStation 3, the event instead left them cranky about the feckless sales pitch, weak games, and high price tag. Over the next few days, bloggers tried to capture Sony's cluelessness, but none were so eloquent as YouTube user Macaw45, who posted a video titled "Sony E3 2006 Press Conference in 1 Minute." Editing footage from the event, Macaw45's clip distilled the meltdown with DJ-like dexterity, looping key moments for maximum effect. The defining shot in Macaw45's montage showed a game developer explaining how to defeat giant enemy crabs: "Attack its weak point for massive damage!" A meme was born: The phrase became the "All your base are belong to us" of 2006, and it was used as shorthand for Sony's lameness. The inevitable T-shirts, dance remixes, and homages followed. Marketing execs beware: Geeks with iFilm can pare you down to your essence - you'd better hope you like what they find.
- Daniel Dumas
Widgets: Itty-Bitty Killer Apps
Don't bother with your browser. Get widgets: single-purpose software tchotchkes for your computer or mobile phone. Here are some of our faves.
OBLIQUE WIDGET
Break that mental logjam: Click to see one of the creativity-sparking cards from the deck of Oblique Strategies by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt.
BEDROCK BIORHYTHMS ENERGY WAVE MAPPER
Pseudoscience goes high tech. Feed this Mac applet your DOB and it can, like, totally chart your high and low energy days.
JAXTR
Tell this Web-based VoIP widget your phone number and anyone who visits your MySpace profile or blog can call you for free with one click. It even takes messages.
MASTER CHIEF VICTORY DANCE
Make the gun-totin' Halo hero dance on your desktop with this Yahoo tool. You'll be the talk of the whole cubicle farm!
FLICKR FOR WIDSETS
This app can search for photos by tag or push pics to your cell via RSS. Runs on most Nokia and Sony Ericsson mobiles.
- Michael Calore
Sick? Take a Number.
Pop quiz: You wake up feeling like a Winnebago ran over your head and Boy Scouts built a campfire in your lungs. Something is seriously amiss. You:
A. go to the emergency room... and wait.
B. call your doctor and beg the receptionist for an urgent appointment.
C. head to the nearest Target store.
If you answered C: Bull's-eye. A new brand of health care is coming to drugstores, Wal-Marts - even supermarkets - near you. These so-called retail clinics don't handle the big stuff - no burst appendixes or torn rotator cuffs, please - but for routine physicals, flu shots, and it-hurts-when-I-do-this stuff, they're a faster, cheaper alternative. There are 683 in-store mini clinics nationwide, a figure that will quintuple in five years. The key is an express-lane approach. There are no appointments (but like Domino's, they usually deliver in 30 minutes or less), visits take about 15 minutes (though you're more likely to see a nurse practitioner than an MD), and the average charge is just $40. All they need now is drive-through.
- Thomas Goetz
Google Bait
Gates. Jobs. Larry and Sergey. The founders of legend took big ideas and built entire industries out of them. So among today's legion of Internet startups, there must be some with equally outsize ambitions, right?
Nope. Today's startups are built, by design, on small ideas - simple snippets of code novel enough to lure a big fish. Gone is the old blather about changing the rules. Now it's turn on, fund up, sell out.
kSolo.com, del.icio.us, and dodgeball.com - these are canap companies, tempting tidbits for the appetites of News Corp., Yahoo, and (especially) Google. Eric Schmidt has said Google swallows a couple each week: "One-two-three people, and you never, never hear about them." Scroll through the TechCrunch archive and you'll see dozens of names you don't recognize: iJigg, meebo, Geni, Nimbuzz, flikzor. Whatever these little companies may do, they're all built on the idea that one idea - along with a snazzy logo and a beta Web site - is enough.
- Kevin Kelleher
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