Smartphones are awesome. They are futuristic and reminiscent of our imagined future where we all carry our personal computers in our pockets. Robots are also awesome, and for very similar reasons. If only there were some way to combine the two into something so future-tastic that it would make us nostalgic for a time that hasn’t even happened yet. Well, late this August, in Las Vegas there will be. At the annual Appcon event this year, they will be holding a fantastic competition known as the Cellbot Hackathon. Yes, the premise is just as epic as the name makes it sound.

Take Youtube, change the language, fill it with even more competent hackers, and give it carte-blanche permission from the most powerful country in the world to infringe on whatever copyrights they want.  That will give you an idea of what the Chines video site Tudou is like.  Naturally, the site has been a major force in Chinese social media and in global media piracy.  There isn’t a TV/Movie link farm out there that doesn’t have half of its links ending up there; not to mention it’s the Youtube of the most populous nation in the world.  Well, they just joined forces with Chines search giant Soso to create a comprehensive video search engine for Tudou.  How does this effect people outside of China you ask?  Well, for starters, media piracy is about to get a lot more pervasive worldwide.

The case didn’t look to be a particularly big deal when it was going on, but Youtube just won a rather important precedent setting case in the realm of digital content and copyrights.  They were recently involved in a case with Viacom involving the procedures necessary to deal with copyright infringement in cyberspace.  The ruling in favor of Youtube means that, from this point on, it is going to be a good bit harder to get media taken down from the internet… or at least harder to make it legally necessary for someone else to have to.

Ok, so by now we are all aware of the mountain of feature upgrades that Google has been piling onto Google Docs.  They’re trying to prove to the world that they are the superior method of putting Office documents in the cloud, and some of these features are even enough to make you think twice.  However, today Google has really outdone themselves with the release of this new feature: scanned character recognition.  Yes, that is as in “scan a printed document, and have it digitally converted to a editable Google Doc” character recognition.

You know this story all too well.  You are surfing the internet intently; both business and pleasure simultaneously.  Every now and then you come across something interesting/useful enough that you want to look at it later that day, but not enough that you want to bookmark it. What do you do? Leave the window active and minimize.  Rinse, lather and repeat for an hour or so, and you’ve got a lot of windows open using up a lot of internet mo-jo.  Eventually, one of the applications in one of the windows crashes.  Unfortunately, this sets into motion a chain of events that makes the entire program crash.  Every window closes in a glorious explosion in web-failure, and you lose every bit of progress on every site.  Well, Mozilla has just shown why they are the#1 browser by fixing this problem in beta through new crash protection protocols.

Ever since Google bought that former branch of Microsoft that allowed them to make cloud MS office options, they’ve been doing surprisingly well at providing a decent alternative to standard MS office cloud.  It’s actually surprising, given how utterly dominant/streamlined office currently is.  They even did well enough that Microsoft had to make their cloud-based office free to continue to compete.  However, it looks as though Google may be ruining their “no idiotic marketing decisions with MSO Google Docs” streak.  They are seriously pushing the Chrome extensions/applications of using the new Google docs, and by extension trying to push Chrome.

Slowly but surely, everything we do on a daily basis is being replaced by digital versions.  From silly entertainment to paying your bills and money management, everything at least has a digital option.  Naturally, this makes things more efficient (and more awesome), but it has the unpleasant side effect of making  privacy and identity much more complicated and dangerous issues in the modern world.  Unfortunately, there are some unpleasant questions that the semi-anonymous yet sensitive nature of the internet draws.  Well, soon a large number of those questions are about to be answered, but as you would expect, the answer will carry with it a slew of new questions- The Anonymizer

In the great war for smartphone operating system dominance, the two major factions have seemed to be Apple, with the iPhone, and Android, with nearly every other device imaginable.  However, this has not stopped other third parties from trying to play their hand.  Since they’ve already been feuding enough with the two major contenders as it is, Microsoft figured that now would be as good a time as any to start making  headway for their own smartphone OS upgrades.  According to both Microsoft and Motorola, the new Enterprise Digital Assistant will have a new mobile Microsoft operating system that comes standard.

Remember that file-sharing upgrade that Google Docs recently got to set themselves apart from Microsoft Word Online again?  Well Google didn't like being outdone even more than we thought, and there were actually two other rather impressive improvements to the cloud documents system released in the same wave of upgrades.  The first of which is an improvement to the UI for documents and Spreadsheets. While the new UI for documents isn’t particularly groundbreaking, the spreadsheet UI may be the closest someone’s actually come to imitating Excel well.  Granted it’s still very much NOT Excel (they have been perfecting it for decades), but this is an order of magnitude closer than any copycat has done before.

Whether it is arguing over how best to regulate getting necessary internet access to everybody who needs it, or big social media giants patting themselves on the back for their good deeds, the socioeconomic benefits of the information age has been a hot topic lately.  Well, it seems that while others have been talking and/or arguing about the issue, some people have actually gone about making something happen.  An organization called “The Alliance for Digital Equality” has just made and publicly presented their proposed plan to get high speed internet to every inhabitant of Los Angeles.  If they can actually get the backing and subsequently implement it, it would be quite a game-changing feat.

We are all aware of the battle going on between Microsoft and Google over who will control Microsoft Word’s cloud implementation.  With MS word still being the dominant word processing program and cloud on the verge of becoming something big, whoever controls MS word in the cloud is going to have quite a bit of tech-clout.   After Microsoft caved and made their product free, Google had to counter by having some sort of advantage other than being free.  Never the ones to be out-done, Google has just given Google Docs a major upgrade in the cloud utility department.

Okay, so as we already know the FCC is trying to get broadband internet reclassified as something that they actually have the right to regulate.  Naturally, a great deal of people aren’t particularly pleased.  From senators with connections to broadband providers, to concerned citizens, people all upset at the proposed “socialization” of the internet.  Why shouldn’t they be?  Competition between the internet providers ought to be regulation enough, right?  Normally that would be absolutely true, but that’s the problem with the current state of broadband: there isn’t any actual completion.

There has been a fairly sizable hubbub surrounding the F.C.C. and their ongoing battle with the current state of the internet.  Naturally, now that they have just officially opened up a notice of inquiry to reclassify Broadband, there is a great deal of debate over whether or not this is a good idea.  The way some look at it, the reclassification of broadband as a utility could potentially damage the major broadband providers.  Jobs could be lost, and the already limping economy could be damaged.  However, there are a number of reasons that, despite the outcry, this could very well be a good thing.

Augmented reality isn’t the only otherwise underrated technology being showcased at this year’s E3 gaming conference.  Apparently, 3D technology is actually making quite a show.  Yes, that little gimmick that was pretending like it was going to be the next big thing in entertainment for the six months following Avatar’s release (remember the CES 2010). E3 has seen some excellent 3D hardware support in the form of the 3DS.  The 3DS is the world’s first ever glasses-less three dimensional gaming platform, and it looks like it’s here to stay.

So, a little while back, we were all excited that augmented reality technology had finally become a product that was available to consumers on any sort of meaningful scale, but a bit disappointed that software support was a long ways away.  Then we were ecstatic to find out that someone was planning to support the technology thing on the software end of things.  Well, now the final omen of true success for the budding tech has arrived: they have made a good game utilizing augmented reality.