200 million connected TV devices will cumulatively ship in the next 18 months, and combined with Xbox (23 million+ Live customers), PS3, Wii, and devices like Apple TV and Roku, about 300 million Connected TVs will be in living rooms in the next 18 months. That’s as many TVs connected to the Internet as Android devices in the market today.

In other words, the Connected TV ecosystem today is in a similar place to the Android ecosystem in mid-2010. Players like Netflix have already built billion-dollar businesses on Connected TV – Nielsen found that over 85% of Netflix streaming customers use Netflix on their living room TV.

Computers have been getting steadily “better” — faster, smaller, cheaper — for sixty years. But they get “smarter” — more capable and more broadly useful — in discrete leaps, the biggest of which don’t happen very often. We’re overdue for our next big leap.

Working with computers is intoxicating. The price/performance curve is always moving to the right. Every year one can do more: Design new user experiences, write new kinds of programs, and develop new hardware. In this context of constant change, it’s easy to focus on the trees rather than the forest. Good engineering is often about incremental improvement. Good business is often about finding product/market fit, while good design is often about giving users an interface that is easy to understand.

The three main complaints about Devon Works’ original Tread watch were that is was gigantic, it was noisy, and it was expensive. So the company addressed all three of those issues with their recently u…

It seems that noted firebrand Mike Daisey’s story – the one about the crippled, underaged factory workers who unspooled tales of woe and torture at the hands of their evil Foxconn masters at Apple’s behest – was at least partially fabricated. He was outed as, at best, a bad journalist and at worst a fraud. To be clear, he’s a monologist and playwright and had no business telling this story (just as he really had no business telling Amazon’s story way back when) but he, like so many creatives, riffed on science and technology for popular effect and got both drastically wrong.

I just got the new iPad in the mail, and naturally the first thing I did was load up a few of my old apps and throw some content on there. Oh god! Oh no!

One of my favorite apps, GoodReader, which opens a great variety of files and which I use to consume the enormous PDFs from Google Books, is a patchwork of pixels. My go-to Mahjong game, aliased to hell! Muji notebook – my pencil leaves a chunky trail!

Developers, I just want to tell you how critical it is that you upgrade your app to look at least passable on the new displays. The full-on big update can come later. But Apple has thrown your standard-def apps under the bus, and you need to drag yourselves out before your capricious iPad users lose faith.

If you’re reading this right now, you already know what day it is: iPad day.

We headed down to the 5th Ave. flagship store in Manhattan this morning to see just how crazy things would get, but truth be told, the mood was quiet. In fact, the media seemed to be the most raucous, while soon-to-be iPad owners simply tried to keep warm in the freezing mist.

At over a million digital listens, “Mr. Daisey Goes To The Apple Factory” is This American Life’s most popular episode. That’s no small feat for one of the world’s most well-known radio shows. When it aired, it set off yet another firestorm of controversy regarding the ethics of Apple (and other large tech companies) using cheap Chinese labor through major manufacturers like Foxconn. Mr Daisey, who has been touring for years with a monologue about his visit to the factories there and the moral implications thereof, provided details to This American Life to put together what was really a powerful and attention-grabbing piece.

Unfortunately, in the words of This American Life host and producer Ira Glass, “We’ve learned that Mike Daisey’s story about Apple in China – which we broadcast in January – contained significant fabrications. We’re retracting the story because we can’t vouch for its truth.”

This week’s show will take a full hour to detail the errors and fabrications in Daisey’s report.

Attach a silicon Grippy Pad to your car’s dash, and your phone will stick to it as if by magic. Apparently taking its cue from the design of gecko’s feet, Grippy Pad sticks to gadgets without messy adhe…

Like a high-tech version of Boo, this heartwarming little 8GB flash drive hard drive is an adorable miniature version of the real thing. Except that instead of taking the internet by storm, it’s content…

I have a confession to make: despite having reviewed a few e-readers, and having written dozens of articles about them, I’ve never really used one. I mean, I’ve used them enough to know a good one from a bad one, to understand the features, and to do a proper evaluation — but I’ve never made one part of my life, the way one makes a mobile phone or laptop part of one’s life. In that way I haven’t really used an e-reader. Until just recently.

As a book lover, I view e-readers as interlopers; as a practical person, I acknowledge them as inevitable. But in both cases, I have come to view them as a deeply unsatisfying reading experience. They fall short of paper in meaningful ways, and objecting to them should not be considered technophobic.

The future of e-books is bright, but as far as I’m concerned, right now we’re still in the dark age — though that isn’t to say the stone age.