Bits: At C.E.S. 2014, a Battle for the Next Generation of Computing

Critic’s Notebook: Xbox, Nintendo and PlayStation Look to Next Generation of Consoles

It is the latest in a generational line of Xboxes, PlayStations and Nintendos to arrive in the past quarter-century. To dedicated gamers, each generation is as relevant and real a part of the calendar as an Olympiad or a presidential election cycle. Gamers argue about which one is the best.

But the previous generation has stretched on longer than those before it and segues into the next at a time when there might be a meteor in the sky. Serious people discuss whether these new consoles, facing competition from cellphones and tablets, might be endangered. Untethered from a television, mobile devices — which draw hundreds of millions of people to distraction with Angry Birds, Clash of Clans and Temple Run — make gaming more convenient. The home console’s appeal is dependent on the notion that gaming on a television still matters.

The industry is at the start of its eighth console generation: the Xbox One, Sony’s PlayStation 4 and Nintendo’s Wii U. The Microsoft and Sony machines are planned for release this year; Nintendo’s device shipped in November, for the 2012 holiday season. Generations typically last a half-decade and are preceded by the promise that the new, ever more powerful devices will improve the world’s youngest major creative medium, make their manufacturers a lot of money and in some way reconfigure living rooms across the world.

The point of an Xbox is to “bring the things you love to life,” Don Mattrick, Microsoft’s chief of interactive entertainment, said in an interview outside the Xbox One tent. “You love entertainment. You love TV. You love games. This is going to be the premium experience for enjoying those things.”

Mr. Mattrick’s challenge, like that of his counterparts at Sony and Nintendo, is to convince people that the game console and its ubiquitous controllers aren’t going the way of the landline telephone or, in a threat that hits closer to home, the arcade machine. Just a few decades ago the home console was an upstart. By the late 1990s it was unseating arcade machines, gobbling the public’s attention the way Pac-Man used to gobble all those dots (and quarters). Consoles like the Nintendo 64 and the Sony PlayStation brought the graphics and sounds of arcade-caliber gaming home and improved on them by offering richer, deeper worlds to play in.

The outgoing console generation started in 2005 with Microsoft’s Xbox 360. Sony’s PlayStation 3 followed a year later, as did Nintendo’s Wii, with a motion-sensitive controller that turned it into a cultural phenomenon. In an age when iPhones are displaced every year, 2005-era console technology is nearly Paleolithic. It’s a testament to the ability of programmers to squeeze performance out of an established hardware standard that new games on the Xbox 360 can still look and sound impressive in 2013.

Proponents of consoles argue that most mobile games, while increasing in appeal, lack key qualities of console gaming. “They’re very bite-sized, very light on the story, very light on the emotions and the different things that a proper sit-down-on-your-couch-with-a-50-inch-screen-and-surround-sound experience can provide,” said Scott Rohde, who leads the highly regarded in-house American game development studios for Sony PlayStation.

Microsoft’s vision for the Xbox One extends beyond gaming. It is designed to switch from playing games to showing cable television with a snap of the fingers. Older consoles simply played games, but newer ones are designed to play television shows and movies.

That shift in focus has been gradual but definite at Microsoft, which added one of its most popular features to the Xbox 360, the ability to stream movies through Netflix, in 2008. At the tent event Mr. Mattrick, a former video game designer, announced a deal with the N.F.L. that would empower the Xbox One to display an interactive fantasy league application on the right side of a TV while the left side displayed a live football game.

Mr. Rohde and Mr. Mattrick may be rivals in the current console generation, but they are joined by colleagues on both sides who argue that the increased horsepower and technical flash of new consoles can make video game characters appear to be more realistic and increase a player’s emotional engagement. They suggest that better technology enables greater aesthetic achievement in their medium. This is by no means a settled point, nor even a universally shared belief of what it takes to advance the artistry of games. That view was in fact recently mocked at a recent conference for game creators by the independent developer Chris Hecker, who played a reel of proclamations by top console game developers who claimed that more powerful technology would beget more emotionally sophisticated gaming.

Stephen Totilo is the editor in chief of the gaming site Kotaku.com.

Etiquette Returns for the Digital Generation

Their apparent goal: to help members of Generation Y navigate thorny, tech-age minefields like Paperless Post invites, same-sex weddings and online dating — not to mention actual face-to-face contact with people they encounter in the offline world.

For instance, you may not think you need a tutorial on shaking hands when being introduced to someone for the first time, but Gloria Starr, an image consultant based in Newport Beach, Calif., begs to differ.

“When you shake hands, it’s two or three times up and down — from the elbow and not the wrist,” Ms. Starr says in one of her 437 YouTube videos, helpfully bobbing her right hand up and down in demonstration. Then “smile and introduce yourself.”

Or how about the way to conduct yourself at the gym? Videos on gym etiquette are a particularly hot Web topic of late, said Kevin Allocca, the trends manager for YouTube. One video, “Don’t Be That Guy at the Gym,” shows five men demonstrating various sweat-soaked faux pas, like the “meathead” who grunts loudly each time he performs a rep, or the self-anointed “coach” who offers unsolicited (and largely unwelcome) advice to other gym-goers. Posted last April, it has been viewed some 3 million times.

No arena of modern life, it seems, is too obscure or ridiculous for consideration. An instructional Web site called Howcast.com has a popular channel on YouTube that tackles weighty issues like how to handle flatulence in yoga class or how to behave at a nude beach. “If it would be unseemly to gape at that body part while it’s fully clothed,” the latter video instructs, “it’s downright rude to gawk at it undressed.”

On another video, one veteran of the fast-food industry proffers advice on how to act at a drive-in window (“Do not scream ‘hello’ as soon as you pull up to the speaker. Wait to be greeted”), while there are more than 500 videos on the momentous subject of how to properly set the dinner table.

But perhaps the fastest-growing area of social advice — one that has spawned not just videos but also Web sites, blogs and books — is the Internet itself, and the proper displays of what’s been termed “netiquette.” There are YouTube videos on using emoticons in business e-mails, being discreet when posting on someone’s Facebook wall, limiting baby photos on Instagram, retweeting too many Twitter messages and juggling multiple online chats.

“We’re living in an age of anxiety that’s a reflection of the near-constant change and confusion in technology and social mores,” said Steven Petrow, an author of five etiquette books including “Mind Your Digital Manners: Advice for an Age Without Rules,” to be published in 2014. (Mr. Petrow is a regular contributor to The New York Times, writing an advice column on gay-straight issues for the Booming blog.)

“Whether it’s wondering how many times it is acceptable to text a date before being seen as a stalker, or what the role of parents is at a same-sex wedding,” he said, “etiquette gurus are popping out from under tablecloths everywhere to soothe all those living in fear of newfangled faux pas.”

Such advice is dished out on Web sites run by protocol professionals like the dapper Thomas Farley, a television talk-show staple, and Elaine Swann, a San Diego County-based consultant, and in the online newsletter Dot Complicated, published by Randi Zuckerberg, the former Facebook executive.

“Many of these emerging etiquette issues are complicated because there are no clear-cut, black-and-white answers,” Ms. Zuckerberg said. A recent post on Dot Complicated dealt with how to respond to a request for money, something that Ms. Zuckerberg, C.E.O. of Zuckerberg Media, said she has had to deal with quite frequently. (Her advice: “Say no and say it quickly.”)

Young people “are getting sick of the irony, rudeness and snark that is so prevalent in their online lives,” said Jane Pratt, the editor in chief of xoJane, a women’s lifestyle site where etiquette posts are a popular feature. “The return of etiquette is in part a response to the harshness of the interactions they are having in the digital sphere.”

“Nice is very cool right now,” she added.

THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY is scurrying to catch up, with a flurry of new etiquette books. “Etiquette is a popular publishing subject right now because, yes, it’s true, good manners never go of style,” said Christine Carswell, the publisher of Chronicle Books, which will publish “The Forgetful Gentleman” by Nathan Tan in May.

Last year alone, three books that tackle such subjects were published by contributors to The Times: Henry Alford’s “Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That: A Modern Guide to Manners”; Philip Galanes’s “Social Q’s: How to Survive the Quirks, Quandaries and Quagmires of Today”; and the former “Ethicist” columnist Randy Cohen’s “Be Good: How to Navigate the Ethics of Everything.”

Other notable titles include “Miss Jane Austen’s Guide to Modern Life’s Dilemmas,” by Rebecca Smith, a British novelist who says she is a direct descendant of the “Pride and Prejudice” author, and “What Would Michelle Do? A Modern-Day Guide to Living with Substance and Style,” by Allison Samuels, a Daily Beast senior writer, who looks to the White House for guidance.

The social quandaries seem to be endless. Are you obligated to respond to Facebook party invitations? Is it rude to listen to your iPod while car-pooling?

Gadgetwise Blog: The Original Digital Pet Returns for a New Generation

The Tamagotchi L.I.F.E. app from Bandai.

Making the most of a recent nostalgia trend in technology that has brought back brands like Furby and Pac-Man, Bandai is reintroducing Tamagotchi, the digital pet from the 1990s, as a lifestyle brand called Tamagotchi L.I.F.E. (for Love Is Fun Everywhere).

The original Tamagotchi was a toy that fit on a keychain; the new version is a smartphone app. An iOS version was released on Thursday, following the introduction of an Android app last month. The app is free, but comes with banner ads; an ad-free version is available for 99 cents.

The app recreates the same nurturing play that Tamagotchi offered when it was introduced in the United States 16 years ago. It eats, it sleeps and it poops. It can die, too, so you have to take care of it by feeding it, playing games with it and giving it medicine when it gets sick. To increase awareness of your parenting duties, the little guy sends alerts when it needs attention, at least a half-dozen times a day. Fortunately, Tamagotchi sleeps through the night.

The app has color graphics and better resolution than the original Tamagotchi, but it still has the same pixelated appearance of the original. If you’re feeling really nostalgic, a toy mode replicates the look of the original, including the shell that housed it. The app also includes a few extras, like a rock-paper-scissors game and the ability to share photos of your bouncing baby blob on Facebook.

The app is a simple pastime, but I can see how it could get tedious after a few days for anyone over the age of 7. The Tamagotchi’s incessant appetite is bested only by the piles of stinking poop it makes (you can tell they are stinky because they have wavy stink lines rising above them).

Unlike other mindless apps, there are no ropes to cut or fruit to slice or birds to sling at pigs. Bandai may have updated the brand for a new audience, but it forgot to advance the concept.

In Wi-Fi-Intoxicated Manhattan, a Generation of Teetotalers

Thus did the three women find themselves in a ground-floor room, bathed in fluorescence, on Thursday at the First Presbyterian Church, in Greenwich Village, just north of Washington Square Park. Every month the church hosts a seminar as part of its Aging Well series, and on this night the topic was “What’s Wi-Fi and Do I Really Need a Smartphone?” New York may be one of the most wired, smartphone addicted-slash-addled cities in the nation, but the pace of the technological leaps has left a lot of older people behind, wondering what they were missing and whether it was worth finding out.

About three dozen people attended, most in their 70s and 80s. Many came armed with answers of their own. Whatever Wi-Fi was, it sounded a little scary, untrustworthy or hopelessly complicated. As for smartphones, they had turned people, body snatcher-like, into distracted drones.

“They’ve dropped out of social intercourse on the street,” said Bob Moran, a 76-year-old mostly retired social worker who owns a dying computer but no cellphone.

Mr. Moran said he cursed out people who chatted on smartphones in restaurants or who texted their way down sidewalks, heads in that telltale bend. “I think it’s going to end badly, this lack of contact in the world,” he said.

Sandy Guzik, 72, proud to own neither a smartphone nor a cellphone, was there “so I can tell people even more about why I don’t want one.”

“People say, ‘What if there’s an emergency?’ I say, ‘There’s nine people around me who have one,’ ” she said. “I’ve never had that emergency, and neither have they.”

“I’ve seen children neglected,” she added darkly. “I’ve seen friends neglected.”

Several others said they were there for the light dinner that was served beforehand — $7 a head for cold cuts on baguettes with tortilla chips, soda, coffee and a pastry. Still, the place really filled in at 6:45 p.m., when the seminar began.

Robert Finkenthal stood before them, a technology trainer at NYU Langone Medical Center who spent six years working at a nonprofit organization that specialized in teaching technology to older people. Many of his elderly students felt fearful or anxious about technology, he said beforehand, or were embarrassed about not being in the digital mainstream. “The worst is not knowing what it is, not knowing how to get there, and knowing that everyone around you is completely hooked in,” Mr. Finkenthal said.

PowerPoint slides glowed on a roll-down screen. Mr. Finkenthal explained what smartphones were, and what the differences between them were, and what apps were.

“Has anybody heard of Angry Birds?” he asked. Murmurs followed. Not one hand went up.

He moved onto Wi-Fi.

“WiFi,” a seminar participant wrote on a pad of paper, adding the phonetic pronunciation for Wi: “Y.”

After an hour and a half, Mr. Finkenthal took questions. Do all smartphones have Internet connections? Is there a way to turn the Internet off? Did he use a headset and was he concerned about radiation? Could you watch an Audrey Hepburn movie on your phone?

Afterward, the Rev. Richard Pease, who organizes the seminars, thanked Mr. Finkenthal, saying, “I’m too old to understand this, but I think it’s great.”

The audience began filtering out. Ms. Guzik said the seminar reinforced her resolve to never get Wi-Fi. The Internet was addictive enough, she said; when she logged on at libraries, whole afternoons vanished.

Ms. Anderson said that when she did get around to buying a computer, she would be sure to get wireless, to obviate the need for wires.

Robert McCarl, 81, found it terrifying that smartphones could pinpoint the user’s location. “They could put a bomb on your head anytime,” he said. Who could? “Your enemies,” he replied. “Your slobbering enemies.” Still, Mr. McCarl deemed Mr. Finkenthal’s presentation “terrific.”

“It was fascinating,” he said as he rose to leave. “But it’s not my generation, so I didn’t know what he was talking about half the time.”

In Wi-Fi-Intoxicated Manhattan, a Generation of Teetotalers

Thus did the three women find themselves in a ground-floor room, bathed in fluorescence, on Thursday at the First Presbyterian Church, in Greenwich Village, just north of Washington Square Park. Every month the church hosts a seminar as part of its Aging Well series, and on this night the topic was “What’s Wi-Fi and Do I Really Need a Smartphone?” New York may be one of the most wired, smartphone addicted-slash-addled cities in the nation, but the pace of the technological leaps has left a lot of older people behind, wondering what they were missing and whether it was worth finding out.

About three dozen people attended, most in their 70s and 80s. Many came armed with answers of their own. Whatever Wi-Fi was, it sounded a little scary, untrustworthy or hopelessly complicated. As for smartphones, they had turned people, body snatcher-like, into distracted drones.

“They’ve dropped out of social intercourse on the street,” said Bob Moran, a 76-year-old mostly retired social worker who owns a dying computer but no cellphone.

Mr. Moran said he cursed out people who chatted on smartphones in restaurants or who texted their way down sidewalks, heads in that telltale bend. “I think it’s going to end badly, this lack of contact in the world,” he said.

Sandy Guzik, 72, proud to own neither a smartphone nor a cellphone, was there “so I can tell people even more about why I don’t want one.”

“People say, ‘What if there’s an emergency?’ I say, ‘There’s nine people around me who have one,’ ” she said. “I’ve never had that emergency, and neither have they.”

“I’ve seen children neglected,” she added darkly. “I’ve seen friends neglected.”

Several others said they were there for the light dinner that was served beforehand — $7 a head for cold cuts on baguettes with tortilla chips, soda, coffee and a pastry. Still, the place really filled in at 6:45 p.m., when the seminar began.

Robert Finkenthal stood before them, a technology trainer at NYU Langone Medical Center who spent six years working at a nonprofit organization that specialized in teaching technology to older people. Many of his elderly students felt fearful or anxious about technology, he said beforehand, or were embarrassed about not being in the digital mainstream. “The worst is not knowing what it is, not knowing how to get there, and knowing that everyone around you is completely hooked in,” Mr. Finkenthal said.

PowerPoint slides glowed on a roll-down screen. Mr. Finkenthal explained what smartphones were, and what the differences between them were, and what apps were.

“Has anybody heard of Angry Birds?” he asked. Murmurs followed. Not one hand went up.

He moved onto Wi-Fi.

“WiFi,” a seminar participant wrote on a pad of paper, adding the phonetic pronunciation for Wi: “Y.”

After an hour and a half, Mr. Finkenthal took questions. Do all smartphones have Internet connections? Is there a way to turn the Internet off? Did he use a headset and was he concerned about radiation? Could you watch an Audrey Hepburn movie on your phone?

Afterward, the Rev. Richard Pease, who organizes the seminars, thanked Mr. Finkenthal, saying, “I’m too old to understand this, but I think it’s great.”

The audience began filtering out. Ms. Guzik said the seminar reinforced her resolve to never get Wi-Fi. The Internet was addictive enough, she said; when she logged on at libraries, whole afternoons vanished.

Ms. Anderson said that when she did get around to buying a computer, she would be sure to get wireless, to obviate the need for wires.

Robert McCarl, 81, found it terrifying that smartphones could pinpoint the user’s location. “They could put a bomb on your head anytime,” he said. Who could? “Your enemies,” he replied. “Your slobbering enemies.” Still, Mr. McCarl deemed Mr. Finkenthal’s presentation “terrific.”

“It was fascinating,” he said as he rose to leave. “But it’s not my generation, so I didn’t know what he was talking about half the time.”

A New Tech Generation Defies the Odds in Japan

“I want to meet like-minded people — basically, people who get the Internet,” said Shingo Hiranuma, 29, a former smartphone engineer at Toshiba who recently introduced a new map application, Sanpo. “And I won’t settle for just anyone.”

As Japan’s aging tech giants like Sony and Panasonic continue to falter, a new generation of Japanese technology entrepreneurs is stepping up. While their numbers are small compared to those in the United States, they are turning to a bevy of start-up incubators and even to financing from Silicon Valley. And so-called start-up dating salons, like the bar in central Tokyo, are helping to match would-be collaborators.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty in Japan right now, and that’s actually made younger Japanese more willing to take risks and try out new ideas,” said Hiro Maeda, 26.

Mr. Maeda went to college at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania and worked on several start-ups in the United States before returning to Japan to create Open Network Lab, a Tokyo-based incubator.

Open Network Lab has financed five rounds of start-ups since its start in 2010. Mr. Maeda said it received close to 100 applications during its latest round this year — more than twice the number from the previous year. The lab provides early funds, office space and mentoring.

Japan badly needs an infusion of entrepreneurial blood. With its economy sluggish and its population graying, the country slipped to No. 25 in the most recent ranking of global innovation by the United Nations, falling out of the top 20 for the first time since the survey began in 2007.

And it has become increasingly clear that the country’s big electronics firms cannot be counted on to drive innovation. Japan’s top tech giants in products from televisions to smartphones, their competitiveness sapped by a strong yen, are racking up huge losses and being overtaken by nimbler, cheaper overseas rivals.

More than ever, many innovations seem incremental or just plain odd. A $4,500 “networked” washing machine released by Panasonic in August that can be operated remotely via smartphone was greeted with derision in the Japanese blogosphere. “Has Panasonic lost its way?” one blogger asked.

Still, Japan’s tech entrepreneurs have much to overcome if they hope to succeed where the mainline giants have not.

Japanese society continues to venerate lifetime company loyalty, while penalizing risk-taking and failure. The government has created a cumbersome web of regulations that hampers new entrants. And risk-taking is absent not just among would-be entrepreneurs, but also among investors, who still favor propping up old companies rather than fostering new ones.

“Whether you’re talking about driving innovation or creating new jobs, it’s clear that Japan needs to try something new,” said Taizo Son, who helped start Yahoo Japan with his brother, Masayoshi Son, in 1996, and now runs the venture capital fund Movida Japan. “But the odds are still stacked against people who dare to try.”

According to the Tokyo-based Venture Enterprise Center, the value of investments by its 50 or so venture capital fund members increased to 24.6 billion yen ($316 million) in 2011, 35 percent higher than the previous year. But that was a small fraction of the $12.6 billion in venture funding raised by Silicon Valley companies that year, according to Ernst & Young.

The proportion of the working population involved in entrepreneurship in Japan — as measured by a start-up portal, InternationalEntrepreneurship.com — stood at 3.3 percent in 2010, one of the lowest rates in the industrialized world. In the United States, the equivalent number was 7.6 percent.

Satoshi Sugie, Junpei Naito, Muneaki Fukuoka and Hiroshi Kurita are among those who are trying. All left comfortable jobs — at Nissan, Sony, Olympus and Japan’s largest advertising agency, Dentsu — to work on Whill, a device that clamps onto wheelchairs to turn them into electric vehicles.

It is a big bet for the founders. Because they were unable to secure large investors, the 6 million yen put toward developing a prototype came from their savings. After it was invited to display the prototype at the Tokyo Motor Show last year, the start-up has been inundated with inquiries from Japan, Europe and the United States, the company says. The start-up is preparing to announce a brand-new model next week.

“At Whill, we move at such a different speed from Sony,” said Mr. Naito, who came up with the idea for Whill before leaving his job this year as a Sony product engineer. “We move things along much faster, and I enjoy that.”

Makoto Fukuyama, 27, and Kota Uemura, 25, ex-Google employees who started Social Lunch in October, have also seen interest surge among users.

Social Lunch’s Facebook-based app helps young professionals set up casual business lunches to expand their social networks. The start-up now has 60,000 users and is adding 10,000 more a month. It won 32 million yen of seed money this year from a new start-up fund started by KDDI, Japan’s second-largest telecommunications firm, but has found that few investors in Japan are willing to offer larger amounts.

Microsoft Sends Engineers to Schools to Encourage the Next Generation

“My teacher said there’s a lot of money to be made in computer science,” Leandre said. “It could be really helpful in the future.”

That teacher, Steven Edouard, knows a few things about the subject. When he is not volunteering as a computer science instructor four days a week, Mr. Edouard works at Microsoft. He is one of 110 engineers from high-tech companies who are part of a Microsoft program aimed at getting high school students hooked on computer science, so they go on to pursue careers in the field.

In doing so, Microsoft is taking an unusual approach to tackling a shortage of computer science graduates — one of the most serious issues facing the technology industry, and a broader challenge for the nation’s economy.

There are likely to be 150,000 computing jobs opening up each year through 2020, according to an analysis of federal forecasts by the Association for Computing Machinery, a professional society for computing researchers. But despite the hoopla around start-up celebrities like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, fewer than 14,000 American students received undergraduate degrees in computer science last year, the Computing Research Association estimates. And the wider job market remains weak.

“People can’t get jobs, and we have jobs that can’t be filled,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel who oversees its philanthropic efforts, said in a recent interview.

Big technology companies have complained for years about a dearth of technical talent, a problem they have tried to solve by lobbying for looser immigration rules to accommodate more foreign engineers and sponsoring tech competitions to encourage student interest in the industry. Google, for one, holds a programming summer camp for incoming ninth graders and underwrites an effort called CS4HS, in which high school teachers sharpen their computer science skills in workshops at local universities.

But Microsoft is sending its employees to the front lines, encouraging them to commit to teaching a high school computer science class for a full school year. Its engineers, who earn a small stipend for their classroom time, are in at least two hourlong classes a week and sometimes as many as five. Schools arrange the classes for first thing in the day to avoid interfering with the schedules of the engineers, who often do not arrive at Microsoft until the late morning.

The program started as a grass-roots effort by Kevin Wang, a Microsoft engineer with a master’s degree in education from Harvard.

In 2009, he began volunteering as a computer science teacher at a Seattle public high school on his way to work. After executives at Microsoft caught wind of what he was doing, they put financial support behind the effort — which is known as Technology Education and Literacy in Schools, or Teals — and let Mr. Wang run it full time.

The program is now in 22 schools in the Seattle area and has expanded to more than a dozen other schools in Washington, Utah, North Dakota, California and other states this academic year. Microsoft wants other big technology companies to back the effort so it can broaden the number of outside engineers involved.

This year, only 19 of the 110 teachers in the program are not Microsoft employees. In some cases, the program has thrown together volunteers from companies that spend a lot of their time beating each other up in the marketplace.

“I think education and bringing more people into the field is something all technology companies agree on,” said Alyssa Caulley, a Google software engineer, who, along with a Microsoft volunteer, is teaching a computer science class at Woodside High School in Woodside, Calif.

While computer science can be an intimidating subject, Microsoft has sought to connect it to the technologies most students use in their everyday lives. At Rainier Beach High recently, Peli de Halleux, a Microsoft software engineer, taught a class on making software for mobile phones.

The students buried their faces in the phones, supplied by Microsoft. They were asked to create programs that performed simple functions, like playing a random song when the phones were shaken.