Image:  MTV

I saw Weird Al last October at the Palace Theater here in Louisville, Kentucky, and it was one of the most top-to-bottom entertaining concerts, comedy film festival, and general performance events I’ve ever seen.  It was a great show, and if you like laughter and fun, it’s worth checking him out either live or just via his great Twitter account.  That’s where this image comes from.

Weird Al is teasing the public over its fascination with Google Glass, and rightfully so.  I’m as intrigued by Google Glass as the next person (perhaps moreso), but it’s getting a little ridiculous.  Then again, if anyone is going to get to play with Google Glass first, it’d be him, right?

Source:  @alyankovic

It’s pilot season, but unlike the pilots that the average television network reviews in private before making series runs, an unlikely source is giving viewers the chance to examine their offerings and determine what gets a potential season order.  Amazon has 14 television programs as part of its inaugural “pilot season.”  Amazon has ordered 8 adult shows and 6 children’s programs, and impressively, none of the projects seem to be B-list or syndicated television shows.

Instead, Amazon has followed the Netflix route and produced some high-quality A-list television shows, or at least attracted A-list talent.  Among the notables in Amazon’s crop of pilots are John Goodman, Jeffrey Tambor, and Bebe Neuwirth in front of the cameras and writers from The Daily Show and the Jim Henson Company as creators and behind-the-camera talent.

“There’s no automatic or mechanistic way that will influence the choice of which shows get a series order, but we’ll put it all together and figure out what story it’s telling and it will play a major role in deciding which shows get ordered,” says Amazon Studios director Roy Price.  ”We’re trying to develop or find shows that will be popular with Amazon customers, so who better to ask than Amazon customers themselves.”

The programs, if picked up, will get 13-episode seasons with episodes being about 22 minutes in length (the length of an average sitcom without commercials).  The shows are available for watching at Amazon’s Instant Video page.  The episodes are expected to be made available for Amazon Prime customers (and those willing to pay to download the episodes), assuming any shows get picked up from this batch.

Just days after announcing an expansion to Austin, Texas, Google Fiber continues its impressive growth.  The next city in line to receive Internet service almost as fast as that of South Korea?  Provo, Utah.  That’s right, Provo will be next to get Google Fiber.

Like with Austin, the deal isn’t officially announced yet, but Google has signed an agreement to buy local broadband provider iProvo.  Pending approval from the Provo city council next Tuesday, Google will be taking over iProvo and beginning the process to upgrade to that beautiful, beautiful 1 gigabyte-per-second ultra high speed Internet service.  Prices and service details haven’t been announced, but it will probably be comparable to Google Fiber offerings in other places.  One of Google’s deciding factors for Provo was the city’s high number of patents, with Provo being second in the US in terms of patents granted.

My only hope is that my hometown can soon become one of Google’s Fiber Cities, but until then, I can dream.

When Windows 8 came out, it was obvious that the design wasn’t meant for standard mouse and keyboard computers.  Sure, there were more traditional UI elements alongside the Metro interface, but by and large, it’s all about Metro and if you want something closer to the traditional interface, you have to select it and you still don’t get the start menu.  However, rumors are that Microsoft is going to bring back the start menu with Windows Blue.

Windows 8.1, the probable real name of Windows Blue, is a necessary change for Windows 8.  Corporate customers and the traditional mass buyers of Windows have been avoid Windows 8 in droves due to the non-traditional UI, and this is the kind of change that would help increase adoption of Windows 8-based operating systems.  The option to boot directly to the standard desktop (and not have to worry about seeing Metro at all) would definitely help me feel better about a Windows 8 computer.

There are two segments of any marketplace with room for growth:  the high end and the low end.  The high end is risky–if you go too heavily into this end and your product fails, you’re losing your shirt.  The low end isn’t as risky, but also isn’t as lucrative.  With Verizon doing well in the top end of things thanks to their iPhone success, and maintaining a popular middle ground, Verizon has decided to go after the low-risk, low-reward lower end of things.  In the cellphone world, that means prepaid plans with no contract.  Verizon is now offering a $35-per-month prepaid plan.

The plan seems like a good deal.  You get 500 minutes (no in-network free calls or free nights and weekends or anything like that) with unlimited text and Internet.  There are only four phones to choose from, all made by Samsung or LG, but if you’re in the market for a cheap phone, this seems like it might be the thing.  Given how little I want to talk and how much more comfortable I am with texts and Internet phone usage, this sounds like a pretty good deal for someone like me who doesn’t talk much on the phone.

T-Mobile is a company actively trying to create some noise in the cell phone game.  The first thing the company did was end monthly contracts.  Now they’re doing something even crazier:  free iPhone upgrades.  If you have an iPhone 4 or an iPhone 4S, T-Mobile will upgrade your phone to an iPhone 5 for free when it comes out April 12.  Essentially, they’re giving you $120 per iPhone trade in, then they knock off their usual $100 fee.  Not too shabby!

The issue with the deal is value.  Namely, the iPhone 4S (and even the iPhone 4) can cost more than the $220 total T-Mobile is giving you, with some Ebay auctions of the low-end iPhone 4 model can be anywhere from $150 to $285 depending on who it is and the condition, and even an iPhone 4 with a cracked screen is fetching $100.  I haven’t looked, but I’m sure the iPhone 4S is fetching prices higher than that.  You may be better off financially by selling your old iPhone at various online retailers, then taking that money and going to T-Mobile to get the phone with that cash.  However, that sounds like a hassle, doesn’t it?  The T-Mobile thing might be a little less of a pain.

A Google TV service comes with Google Fiber.

Download a feature-length film in minutes.  Gain speeds 100 times faster than your current Internet Service Provider.  All at the cost of $300 for 7 years of service.  Sounds awesome, doesn’t it?  No bandwidth issues, no throttling, one-time fee… Google Fiber sounds pretty great, and it seems to have been very popular in its debut in Kansas City, Kansas, and Kansas City, Missouri.  With three options–TV and high-speed internet for $120 a month, high speed internet only for $70 a month, and the 7-year 5 megabites per second service offered for the $300 construction fee, I have no doubt that dozens of cities wanted to find their way into Google’s loving embrace.  However, there can be only one winner, and the next Google Fiber city is rumored to be Austin, Texas

Of course, the rumor isn’t official yet, but Austin and Google have both said they have a major announcement next week, so that’s a pretty dead giveaway of what’s going to be happening.  Those lucky folks in Texas are getting all the breaks.  First they’re the home of the Alamo Draft House, and now this!

On April 3, 1973, Dr. Martin Cooper made a telephone call to AT&T’s Bell Labs from his office at Motorola.  The noteworthy bit about this telephone call?  It wasn’t simply teasing the competition, it was a noteworthy achievement.  Forty years ago, the first cellular telephone call was made.

That phone is the Motorola DynaTAC, which was officially introduced to the mass marker in 1983, a full decade after the initial phone call was made using a prototype.  The first DynaTAC, dubbed the 8000x, weighed a staggering 1.75 pounds.  It offered 30 minutes of talk time and 8 hours of standby, giving it battery life the first generation of iPhone would be envious of.  It was the first cell phone that could connect with the phone network without the aid of an operator for phonecalls, was portable, and lasted until 1994 with continual changes and improvements.

Among the accessories were a leather zippered case with a metal belt clip, a one-hour desktop charger (that sometimes broke the phone batteries and shorted the phone out), and a swiveling brass antenna, which might be the coolest accessory ever invented.

The rumors have been floating around, but they have increased in recent weeks.  Now, there are leaked images of what is supposed to be a Facebook smartphone.  Facebook and HTC are teaming up to produce a Facebook-branded smartphone.  Depending on who you ask, the phone is either the HTC First or the Facebook Home.  Interestingly, Facebook Home is also the name of the special Android build that will be powering the phone.  Amusing that Google’s operating system would power a Facebook phone.

“It looks pretty much identical to the Facebook-HTC device that we described last week,” says rumor website 9to5Google.  ”Given that the image lines up with what [we] previously heard, we expect the device shown above to be the first, or one of the first, Facebook Home handsets.”

Facebook Home supposedly integrates Facebook features into the smartphone environment to make it a more user-friendly and natural experience.  There’s going to be a Facebook Home OS running on the HTC First.  You’d think that the two companies should just call it the Facebook Home by HTC or something to that effect.  Less confusing branding, at least to me.