Adidas has been responsible for making the balls for the soccer (or football for poms) World Cup since 1970, and it’s been a constantly changing centrepiece of the game. The Telstar ball—which features the instantly recognisable pattern of 20 hexagonal and 12 pentagonal sections—was launched by Adidas back in 1970 in Mexico. In 1986, the ball was changed to use plastic instead of leather, and in 2002 for the Korean World Cup, Adidas added a ‘syntactic foam layer’ which improved accuracy.

But the 2006 ball was another step forward in the evolution of ball science altogether.

Instead of using the familiar 32 sections, Adidas made the 2006 ball—dubbed +Teamgeist—from 14 rounded panels. And instead of stitching them together, the panels on the +Teamgeist were thermally bonded (or glued) together, creating a seamless ball that’s almost entirely waterproof.

This change in design from 32 sections to 14 meant that the ball was a lot more accurate, no matter where you actually kicked the ball. At least according to Adidas, who had a robotic kicking machine test out the balls before the world cup by kicking it repeatedly against a wall.

The ball itself had a very mixed reaction during the tournament. Some players loved it, while others blamed it for their losses. Either way, it performed differently to the traditional ball thanks to its newer design.

With Adidas bringing out a new ball every World Cup, and the next tournament being held in South Africa next year, it will be fascinating to see what new and exciting developments Adidas introduces to the ball. Who would’ve though that something as simple as a football would be such a high tech marvel?

Playing With Balls is Gizmodo AU’s week-long look at the technology behind the sports we love, from the jerseys to the balls and everything in between. Go the Blues!

It was a great night, with a great crowd and a fantastic atmosphere. If you’re based in Sydney, you should definitely try and make it to the second episode in a couple of weeks.

The games show will be going live later today, and both should hit iTunes and other Podcast syndication networks tomorrow.

[Byteside]

There’s way too much tech built into the Prius for a single post here on Giz. There are over 1000 new patents for this generation of the hybrid vehicle alone. But here are some of the cooler features anyway:

* Keyless entry with a touch sensitive handle that locks and unlocks your car. The key fob (which ironically doesn’t have any keys) uses radio frequency to let you start the car. If you try and lock the car with the keys still inside, the car will beep at you like roadrunner.

* The HUD. That’s right, there’s a HUD which makes monitoring your speed simple. It also lets you monitor how economically you’re driving, and if you happen to be in the i-Tech model, will also indicate where to turn when you’re using the satnav. Awesome.

* Auto reverse parking. Press a button when you want to park, and the car will use its sensors to park the car for you. There’s something really frickin’ freaky about watching the steering wheel turn by itself as the car reverses into a parking space.

* The solar panels on the roof of the car automatically control a fan in the car which maintains an optimal internal temperature. So you can leave your car in the sun in the middle of the Simpson desert, but when you hop in, it will be a pleasant ambient temperature (or at least cooler than outside). You can even start the AC from the remote if you want to cool the car down.

I’ll be getting a car to drive around for a few days next week, so stay tuned for further in-depth coverage of the tech inside the car. In the meantime, the new Prius is set to launch next week for a starting price of $39,900, which is actually cheaper than the original starting price for the 1st gen Prius.

TiVo
For a long while, TiVo was the undisputed king of TV recording. Other DVRs have come a long way in the last ten years, but they’re all late to the party, and still playing catchup: The TiVo name is now permanently tattooed into the public’s consciousness, synonymous with recording shows and backed up by still-impressive hardware.

But the fact that TiVo has attained a near-Kleenex level of brand recognition in the US doesn’t mean a thing overseas. As of writing, the service is only available in a few other places—Canada, the UK, Mexico, Taiwan and Australia—where it has been met with limited enthusiasm. While the US, with its huge, old, fragmented cable industry, offers a fantastic opportunity for a meta-service like TiVo, smaller countries with one or two dominant pay-TV providers—which have their own increasingly formidable DVR alternatives—are tougher nuts to crack.

The Kindle
This choice might seem odd—or at least inconsequential—on account of the steady stream of new e-reader hardware available all over the world, but Kindle exclusivity is actually a technological feather in America’s cap. Why? Because the source of the Kindle’s importance isn’t its hardware, but its connectivity and the service it’s tied to.

Anyone can slap a case around a panel of E-Ink and add an off-the-shelf Linux OS—and plenty of companies have. But being linked wirelessly to a massive library of legal downloads, bestselling books, magazines and newspapers, is what will make a reader great. For now, the only mainstream reader that can claim such a feature is the Kindle, and the only country that can claim the Kindle is the US. Not that it can’t go global—similar services for music and TV, like the iTunes store, have found ways to deal with tricky licensing and gone global—it’s just that it probably won’t for a while.

Push-to-Talk
Without a doubt, this is the technology that feels the most American on this list. Intended primarily for the workplace, push-to-talk technology has tragically seeped into the mainstream, subjecting millions of innocent mall shoppers to that incessant, inane chirping, and the shouting at the handset that accompanies it. Who hasn’t been inadvertently pulled into the middle of a heated, long-distance argument about novelty Jimmy Dean breakfast sandwiches flavours while waiting in line at Walmart? Well, pretty much anyone who doesn’t live in America—and not just because they don’t have Jimmy Dean, or Walmart.

As it turns out, PTT’s Amerophilia can be explained by little more than poor marketing. According to ABI Research:

In other world regions MNOs have failed to market PTT successfully to business users or have opted to market to consumers, and it just hasn’t taken off.

Nextel, which was inherently crippled by a proprietary network technology that wasn’t built out in any other country but the US, found success with PTT by pitching handsets to businesses as turbocharged Walkie-Talkies, not by marketing them directly to consumers, most of whom would have trouble imagining a more efficient way to make themselves look like brash assholes.

Video On Demand
iTunes has gone worldwide and services like BBC’s iPlayer have brought the Hulu model overseas, but America still has the best VOD situation in the world, bar none. The problem is simple: Even countries with a healthy entertainment industry import a tremendous amount of American TV, often well after it was originally broadcast. This regional disparity seems kinda stupid in the age of the internet and VOD, but it’s just as severe as it ever was.

European or Asian viewers have to wait for painful weeks or months for a domestic channel to licence, schedule and dub international American hits like Lost or Mad Men, and hope, assuming their stations have a VOD service, that the show eventually finds its way online. As an ad-supported service and a product owned by the networks who profit from the above arrangement, Hulu’s reluctance to stream content to countries is understandable, but the despair is deeper than that: You can’t even pay for TV if you want to. People without American billing addresses are barred from VOD services like Amazon’s Unbox, and will find their iTunes video selections sorely lacking.

Satellite Radio
Since is smells distinctly like a waning technology, satellite radio might not do much to stir your techno-patriotism, but goddernit, it’s ours. The US has far more satellite radio subscribers than the rest of the world combined, all through the remains of Sirius and XM, now merged under the lazy moniker of “Sirius XM”. Why? We have lots (and lots) of cars.

Satellite radio actually has roots as a proudly international service—after all, it is broadcast from frickin’ space—having been developed in part by a humanitarian-initiative company called 1Worldspace, which was established to broadcast news and safety information to parts of the globe without reliable terrestrial radio infrastructure. They still exist today, but they broadcast to fewer than 200,000 subscribers, mostly in India and parts of Africa. Satrad’s American success can be solely credited to our auto manufacturers, who eagerly installed satellite units in new cars for years, healthily boosting subscription numbers (but not necessarily car sales). With no comparably pervasive car culture to take advantage of anywhere else in the world, satellite radio is a tough sell.

• Dongle
• Cookie
• WAP
• Phone jack
• (Nokia) Navi Key
• Time shifting
• Digital TV
• Ethernet
• (Nokia/Others) PC Suite
• Desktop

It’s an odd list. Even though the UK loves its Nokias, the inclusion of two proprietary Nokia terms seems innately disproportionate. “Time shifting” was an awkward term to begin with that’s specific but antiquated now that “DVR” has taken over. And as for “phone jack” and “desktop,” yes, it’s disconcerting that laymen don’t understand this “jargon,” but I can’t remember the last time that I used either of these technologies.

So that pretty much leaves “cookie,” “dongle,” “ethernet,” “digital TV” and “WAP” as the terms people need to learn. Please call your grandmothers and inform them as to the proper definitions immediately. [BBC and image]

Designed by Military Wraps, Photo Veil gathers images from cameras on drones, satellites and lidar to create an almost identical duplicate of the object’s surroundings. These images are then displayed on its lightweight, customisable, foldable, portable and waterproof mesh exteriors, thus camouflaging the military vehicles underneath. For those out on foot, the Photo Veil’s breathability and ability to mask thermal and infrared footprints also makes these wraps useful in blinds for snipers and in uniforms for soldiers out in the field. Ooh, you think they’ll make a cloak out of this material just for me to review? I want to be the ultimate Hide n’ Seek champion. [Military Wraps via cnet]

The History

Admittedly, new music formats have always changed the way we listen to music. However, I don’t think any have had such an effect over the last 60 years as the move to MP3 and other digital file formats. The advent of the 45 RPM single in the 50s is arguably the first big shift in the way popular music was consumed. Records went from longer-playing 78s and 33s, to the cheaper 45 format, which carried two or three songs on a disc, and became much more accessible for mass consumption. Soon, every big pop artist was releasing their big hits on 45s, and this became the main mode of consumption.

Then came cassettes, which shrank down the record onto magnetic film and brought the long-playing album back into vogue. Cassingles also remained popular among consumers, but the idea of the album as the main purchase was gaining steam again because tapes were more durable and easier to store. It also made it possible for people to record their own mixes very easily.

But the problem with all these analogue formats is that they wore down and degraded over time. Vinyl lost it’s sound quality the more you played it, scratched easily, and storing it in the wrong place climate would warp it’s shape. Tapes would sound muffled over time, and the actual tape could easily be spooled out from the cassette.

Enter the Compact Disc. Created as a way to prevent the degradation of sound over time, the compact disc ushered in the digital era of music, but it wasn’t without complaints. Audiophiles said the sound was cold and sterile, and purists worried about the idea you could skip around the album order so easily, that albums were meant to be listened to sequentially, and not on one-track repeat for hits. It also wasn’t impervious, still liable to scratching and subsequent choppy playback. Still, it was the best available option to get music to consumers, until the MP3.

Too Much Music

Sometimes, I feel the rise of MP3s made music too easy to obtain. Instead of taking time to appreciate good work, we now devour as much music as we possibly can. My music collection feels increasingly impersonal, to the point that I have albums I’ve forgot I downloaded. Sometimes I’ll listen to an album I like just once, and never touch it again. Why?

Because at any given time, I have about 10-20 other new albums I’m wanting to check out. There’s just not enough time to give every album the same attention, and when you try to really get into a handful of albums, you miss out on 100 other new releases.

The MP3 era is enabling the music junkie’s futile quest to stay up on all music, at all times.

But that’s not to say it’s all bad. Albums that used to take me months to track down in the past can be found with a few minutes of google ingenuity. I’ve been able to listen to artists I might have only known by name in the past, and not have to wait for corporate America to make their music accessible to the masses.

Narrowing Tastes

Despite the greatly enhanced variety of music available to the average music listener, I feel like people’s tastes are actually narrowing, more than they’re branching out. Sure, the hardcore music fan will go out and dig out obscure artists in 20 different genres. But for the casual indie rock fan, it’s just as easy to go out and find 20 other bands who sound just like Sigur Ros.

As a result, you find people digging deeper into genres that they really like, while ignoring the access they have to so many other great genres. The rise of internet forums and communities based around certain kinds of music have only helped listeners to identify with other like-minded individuals and firmly entrench themselves.

However, the rise of unclassifiable, genre-free music this decade would seem to go against my notion of narrowing tastes. Fans have embraced musicians who pull from a variety of seemingly unrelated influences, and reassemble the parts into a whole new beast.

Artists as big as Timbaland, as small as the Avalanches, as weird as Flying Lotus, or as colorful as M.I.A have all made a name for themselves by consciously ignoring the boundaries of genre. And as a result, I’ve seen myself and many of my friends digging into genres, past and present, they previously had ignored. We’re better music fans because of this.

The Death of the Album, The Rise of Musical A.D.D.

I blame the iPod. Before MP3s, when you wanted to listen to something, you at least had to insert a complete album, or at least take the time to piece together a mixtape. Tracklists meant more back then, because it was more difficult to rearrange the order (save for the skip/shuffle functions).

These days, you can crap out whatever you want into an unfocused playlist and take it on the go. Add or subtract songs in a matter of seconds, it’s a thought-free process. There’s no need to give a whole album the time of day anymore when you can just add your favourite. We all have Musical A.D.D.

But the truth is, I’m just being a paranoid purist. When CDs first came out, vinyl purists lamented how too many tracks were packed into the 74-minute capacity discs, and how easily people could just switch from track to track. Before that, the entire pop music culture was formed around 45 RPM singles in the 50s and 60s.

So while the crotchety old man in me wants to say that we need to preserve the complete album, the truth is that it’s significance among music fans has always changed and evolved.

As much I want to say MP3s have ruined all our listening habits, the truth is, they’ve just pushed us into the next wave of music culture. Maybe it means the album tracklist really is dead. Maybe I’ll only listen to a complete album once or twice from here on out. Or maybe it just means people need to start making more interesting albums worthy of such attention.

The in-dash computer has a wireless keyboard and mouse, a 6.5 inch touchscreen. No word on screen res or if the kb and mouse can be swapped with a media centre type model for easier lap usage. The setup has 4GB of memory, and a stylus for the touchscreen. It can even output via bluetooth to an optional battery powered printer.

You’ve got all these upscale marquees, like Lexus, and Audi and BMW and ok, Acura who haven’t done it. Never mind the Astons and Ferraris of the world. And none of them can keep up with Ford. Ford is clearly kicking arse in the tech department.

Do we need this kind of thing with the rise of smart phones? Will car computers die like car phones before they’ve ever born? I hope not, because of the inherent advantages to heavy car integration. Imagine car telemetry, and more advanced connected GPS and media library sharing with the home, as well as road worthy friend finding functions. Stuff like this is best done when fully installed in the vehicle.

Nevermind that this tech will make your car a totally unsafe place to drive, because you are browsing
Fleshbot instead of driving. I mean, the Explorer roll over issues are going to look like child games after this. But I wouldn’t say no.

April 2, 2009 – Mountain View, CA and Las Vegas, NV -

Owners of Ford F-150, Super Duty, E-Series and Transit Connect trucks and vans will now be able to access the full Web from the convenience of their vehicles, thanks to Opera and Ford Work Solutions. Opera will be the featured browser on Ford’s industry-first, broadband-capable, in-dash computer.

With this technology, truck and van owners (contractors, farmers, construction workers, business owners, etc.) will be able to use the in-dash Opera browser to access essential information and applications including sales information, contact databases, job-site plans, inventory lists, calendars, e-mail, or even the weather. The in-dash computer, combined with the Opera browser, Bluetooth printing capabilities, and other features transform Ford’s new lineup of trucks and vans into true mobile offices.

“Opera’s vision has always been about giving people access to the full Web anytime, anywhere,” explains Rod Hamlin, Senior Vice President Americas for Opera Software. “No example showcases this better than delivering a fast, feature-rich Web browser to a vehicle. This solution will allow Ford truck and van owners to maintain a virtual work environment with access to all of the important files, information and applications they need on a daily basis. “

Ford Work Solutions is a collection of factory-installed affordable technologies-including “smart” features that provide full Internet connectivity, tool/inventory tracking, remote computer access, fleet management telematics and security to support Ford customers with mobile office and business needs, even on the job site.

The Ford Work Solutions in-dash computer is integrated into the vehicle’s centre stack, filling the same space normally occupied by the standard radio. It is equipped with a 6.5-inch, high-resolution touch screen, four gigabytes of memory, a secure digital slot for added memory, a USB port and a wireless keyboard and mouse. A stylus, stored next to the CD slot, is included for use on the touch screen, as well as an available Ford-certified, on-board, Bluetooth-enabled, battery-powered inkjet printer.

All four Ford Work Solutions technologies, including the Opera browser, are available on the new 2009 Ford F-150 XL, STX, XLT trucks; F-Series Super Duty XL, XLT and FX4 trucks; and all 2009 E-Series vans. The 2010 Transit Connect van joins the lineup in mid-2009 and will be available with Ford Work Solutions in-dash offerings.

For more information, visit www.fordworksolutions.com.

To see Opera in action on the in-dash computer, click on the “In-Dash Computer” link and then press “play” on the video (Opera, 1min, 38sec).

Mike Elgan, former editor-in-chief for Windows Magazine, writes a great column on how gadgets blogs fail readers. It’s solid feedback and tough love. Here’s my list on why Tech Magazines are failing readers:

1) Too Slow: Most Computer magazines will write reviews of product you’ve already bought or read about on blogs 2 months before. With the exception of Laptop Mag and a few others. How are they catching up in speed? Surprise: blogs.

2) They sometimes ignore the things companies want you to ignore: Magazines need to cover the unofficial topics that are important, even if it involves illegal activity like IP theft. Like BitTorrent. Even if the sponsoring companies don’t agree with how the technology is used, its important to educate the public and industry to its benefits and problems. And rumours are clearly useful to warn people not to buy the stuff that’s just about to become outdated. Without news that corporations don’t sanction, magazines might as well reprint press releases.

3) They charge: So much info on the web is free and ad subsidised, including the blogs. They’ve got ads. So why are they still charging when its costing them readership? The magazine model of getting people to pay for copies is dying a slow death. See: The difference in subscription and cover prices and Chris Anderson’s Free.

4) The websites sometimes suck: In the worst cases, you can’t tell where the new content is. It’s all over the place, nested in a field of links that mean nothing to anyone but advertisers and industry wonks. In the best cases, they make you click through 10 times for every feature: Come on. Pageviews are a dead competitive metric, and you’re just annoying everyone.

5) Their columns are written by people I can’t relate to: The most prestigious print columnists today are at least a decade away from 35. The age is not the issue — but there are economic, social and generational gaps that can’t be bridged.

6) They cover a whole lot of stuff no one cares about: Just because a company puts something out or writes a press release, and it’s on a publication’s beat, doesn’t mean anyone actually cares about it. Market share is not indicative of success. Porsche sells fewer cars than Toyota. More tech journalists should learn to follow their gut instincts, because as tech lovers, you get a great sense of what people are also excited about.

7) They review products without the bigger picture: Most trade mags do a fantastic job of explaining the specs and the benchmark results, without the overall real world effect (usually a small delta of improvement) and social context (see: iPod shuffle’s tiny buttons). Most tech pubs fail at this, blog or mag. Exception: The big columnists at the papers do a great job of this, especially the four horsemen, Pogue, Moss, Levy, and Baig.

8) They presume to be error-free: Last year, right before I canceled my subscription, I read a computer trade with more errors than I’d seen in any magazine. It included type-Os, but also factual F-ups like mention of “Pioneer LCDs TVs”. (Pioneer doesn’t make them here.) Magazines have copy editors, fact checkers and 2 months to deliver this content. And you can’t retract paper.

9) The writing is often boring: OK, not every article has to be funny or Shakespeare, but it shouldn’t make you want to tear your eyes out or go to sleep, either. Tech is inherently a left brain topic; making it an easy and enjoyable thing to learn about and digest is critical and something many trade pubs fail to do! This is increasingly critical as tech and gadgets go more and more mainstream and the average joe comes looking for information.

10) They fail to realise news is collaborative: Mike criticized the gadget blogs for rehashing reviews. First off, aggregation is a service. If someone can check one site, instead of 400, that’s useful. This attitude also seems to ignore the fact that news is collaborative. Sites send each other tips and in return, send links and readers back to the source. That’s how we give credit to our peers online and grow together, as a network. You can’t do that in print.

Bonus 11) Paper: They kill trees and give you papercuts. They cost money to mail. They are heavy and take up space. And they can catch on fire and burn your entire house down! And after all these years, the subscription cards are still annoying. And you can’t search through old print as easily as you can search through old online content.

[image by Mannobhai]