From left: Oren Boiman, Ph.D., founder and CEO of Magisto, accepts his award beside first runner-up "Morey" the macaw.

LAS VEGAS--Magisto took home the top prize in this year's CES Mobile Apps Showdown.

Amid a minefield of technical difficulties at the show, magical one-touch video editor Magisto and its well-rehearsed app demonstration emerged from today's CES Mobile Apps Showdown victorious.

The Mobile Apps Showdown featured 10 finalists, whittled down from dozens of total submissions. At the show, each developer had 4 minutes to pitch his app to the packed LVCC Conference room, and were ultimately judged by a good old-fashioned applause-o-meter.

Attendees were treated to presentations with flashy costumes, acted-out skits, and even a bit of augmented reality. But in the end, it was Magisto's polished presentation and seemingly magical skill set that won over the crowd. Oohs and aahs were heard as Magisto CEO Oren Boiman showed off Magisto's one-touch editing functionality and real-world applications. I covered Magisto's launch here at CES, and was thoroughly impressed with its abili... [Read more]

LAS VEGAS--Initially launched as a desktop browser experience in September of last year, ground-breaking one-click video editor Magisto has just made its way onto iPhones.

With Magisto on your mobile device, it becomes easier than ever to cobble together polished videos that are ready to share on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social networks.

Simply record a few minutes of video through the Magisto app or choose from any existing videos already on your phone, then let Magisto do all of the work for you. And I do mean ALL of the work. Magisto adds the music (of your choice), drops in the transitions, and even uses its superadvanced algorithms to choose what's important, and what to cut. I know it sounds crazy, but so far it looks like it works. The videos I've seen were stylized and actually looked like they were put together by a human being with editing skills. The volume of the music even dipped when people in the video started talking.

Since all of Magisto's magic is done in the cloud, you do need an active data connection to use the app. Also, your edited videos will only live on the company's servers, meaning you can't download them locally. This may sound like a drag, but the good thing is that all of your content will be ready to share to any of your social networks whenever you log in to your Magisto account. Also, reps from Mag... [Read more]

Shazam Player visualizes song lyrics while you listen. Cool!

I'm a sucker for cool visuals, which is why I'm gaga over the new Shazam Player app for iOS. It takes something fairly straightforward--song lyrics--and presents it in a visually stimulating, impossible-to-look-away way.

Shazam, of course, is best known for the eponymous app that listens to and identifies the song that's playing on the radio, in the cafe, during that TV commercial, etc.

Shazam Player aims to replace the stock iPod app with one that offers a few nifty amenities, starting with LyricPlay, a slick feature that visualizes song lyrics as you listen.

For any "compatible" song (more on that in a minute), Shazam Player will stream the lyrics using one of several cool themes. Think karaoke machine, but with fancy fonts and cool transitions.

For example, sometimes the lyrics scroll from the bottom of the screen to the top. Sometimes they fly in from the side and then shrink into the distance. There's even a kind of reverse "Star Wars"-style text crawl. The player mixes up its various streaming modes with different fonts, font sizes, and background colors, so it always... [Read more]

LAS VEGAS--Moscow-based game developer ZeptoLab has today announced Cut the Rope HD for BlackBerry PlayBook.

Om Nom came out swinging here at CES with a demo of the new HTML5 version of the game for IE, followed by the announcement of a licensing division to bring Cut the Rope plush toys to the consumer market. And now, at the tail end of the week, fans of the popular physics-based puzzler get yet another juicy bit of news.

Cut the Rope HD is now available for download in BlackBerry App World for $2.99.

Major security-related events at Microsoft over the past decade

Ten years ago, Microsoft had a big problem. Buggy code was allowing viruses like "CodeRed," "ILoveYou," and "Nimda" to infect millions of computers running its Windows and Microsoft's Web server software.

Times have changed.

Back then, the steady stream of worm outbreaks, coding glitches that annoyed users, and security weaknesses reported by outside researchers was having a steady and negative effect on the company's reputation. Microsoft was everywhere on consumer and corporate PCs worldwide, but the software giant couldn't seem to deliver solid software.

Then came a famous Bill Gates memo on January 15, 2002, that promised to change all that. Gates realized that if the company didn't get its security act together the future of its .Net framework for network services, and the company itself, would be threatened. His company-wide e-mail warned:

As software has become ever more complex, interdependent and interconnected, our reputation as a company has in turn become more vulnerable. Flaws in a single Microsoft product, service or policy not only affect the quality of our platform and services overa... [Read more]

Kindle Format 8, or KF8, uses Web technologies such as HTML and CSS to show much more elaborate e-book layouts.

The dividing line between writing books and writing programs just got a big step blurrier.

That's because Amazon has now released tools for creating books using Web technologies. Those tools include Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), used to describe Web pages, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), used for formatting.

"Through the use of HTML5 and CSS3, KF8 allows publishers to create great-looking books in all categories, particularly those that require rich formatting and design, such as technical & engineering books and cookbooks," Amazon announced. Other features are well suited to graphic novels, comics, and kids' books, Amazon said.

The move reflects the gradual expansion of e-book abilities. Pure text is fine for many books, and it's well suited to the constraints of apps to read on small mobile-phone screens, but graphics are crucial for many markets.

Using Web technology means Amazon gets to capitalize on widely used standards and piggyback on industry efforts for improvements such as hardware-accelerated rendering in browsers.

The first readers able to read the new books are Kindle Fire ta... [Read more]