ping

Pools aren't just for swimming, you know. Brooklyn art studio Red Paper Heart made some pretty nifty art with a swimming hole and 65,000 ping-pong balls. Before you dismiss that as an exercise in lunacy, take a look at a clever interactive pool party experience for yourself in the video below.

Red Paper Heart created the mesmerizing show in conjunction with city guide Web site UrbanDaddy, all for a tequila promotional event in Hamptons, N.Y.. The art studio programmed some software (using C++) to control the projector-driven light show that reacts to music. To enhance the visuals, the group enlisted a team of synchronized swimmers and some tuxedo-clad scuba divers to class up the joint.… Read more

Right on schedule, Apple has closed up shop on its failed music-meets-social networking experiment Ping.

The closure, which was quietly announced from within iTunes last month and slated for September 30, is simply a removal of the feature from within iTunes software, as well as the iTunes Store. Users who attempt to click on the link get an error message and are sent to the Apple Store home page.

Any playlists users made within Ping have been converted to iMixes, Apple's publishable playlist format. Meanwhile, Ping users lose their followers and people they were following with the closure.

The … Read more

Apple has announced the last waltz for Ping, its social music network, after adding greater social-networking integration to iTunes.

The company will shut down Ping on September 30, Apple announced the closure today on the Ping channel on iTunes. The company also announced today that iTunes 11 -- the software's next major release -- adds more sharing options for Facebook and Twitter, including showing music likes and recent purchases.

An Apple representative noted that any playlists users made within Ping will be converted to iMixes, the company's publishable playlist format. However, the feature will become unavailable, and users … Read more

Where does Apple's social network for music fit in, now that the company is injecting Facebook into the very core of iOS and Twitter into the Mac? Nowhere, which is why it will be deep-sixed when iOS 6 arrives, a new report asserts.

Citing "sources close to the company," All Things Digital says Apple's Ping will be no more, when the company rolls out the next major release of iTunes.

The launch of Apple's music-centric social network within iTunes 10 is largely considered one of Apple's recent missteps. The feature lets users post music … Read more

Apple CEO Tim Cook talked for about an hour and a half tonight about myriad topics from patent spats, to product names and the company's efforts in China.

But don't ask the guy about Ping.

Apple's music-centric social network that launched inside of iTunes 10, and is largely considered one of Apple's missteps in the past few years, was a topic Cook was hoping to avoid during the night. The executive confessed that detail during the Q&A session following the interview with D10 show hosts Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher.

ABC News' Joanna Stern … Read more

I'll be blunt: sit at my desk for a week and it's hard not to conclude that there's a startup glut.

The e-mail pitches begin blending together: Company fill-in-the-blank has a new twist on daily deals. Social startup XYZ let's you keep track of all your social activity--really! Wait. You've got to try this messaging app. And on it goes, a blizzard of pitches from companies that will likely soon vanish.

And yet, every year plenty of amazing innovations and breakthrough companies emerge, and 2012 will be no different. Often the most compelling startup is … Read more

Pong, you've come a long way, baby.

Students at China's Zhejiang University have been demonstrating a pair of humanoid robots that can play a pretty mean game of table tennis, by machine standards.

Wu and Kong stand 5.2 feet tall and weigh 120 pounds. They have camera eyes that feed real-time images of the ball to their processors at a rate of 120 frames per second.

Incorporating a high-speed industrial-automation Ethernet technology, the droids take some 50 to 100 milliseconds to respond to the ball's speed and trajectory, knocking it back to the other side of the table.

Their margin of error is less than an inch, according to Xiong Rong, head designer at the university's robot lab. … Read more

The scandal surrounding Rupert Murdoch's News of the World is growing, with new allegations that his papers bribed police to use cell phone-tracking technology to find the exact whereabouts of news subjects, as well as to obtain information about the royal family, and also targeted former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, according to reports.

Two former News of the World journalists said the practice of using the illicit cell phone tracking was known as "pinging" in the newsroom, according to The New York Times. The technology, for which one reporter said the News of the World paid nearly $… Read more

Another ding for Ping.

When Apple rolled out iOS 4.3 a couple weeks ago, it quietly added a few features to the widely reviled Ping social-network service: push notifications for comments and follow requests, parental controls, and so on.

Soon after, many users started reporting a sizable drop in iPhone, iPod, and/or iPad battery life--and it wasn't long before Ping began to emerge as the culprit.

Fortunately, as reported at Pocket-lint and elsewhere, there's a simple fix for the problem: turn off Ping. Here's how: