Hold Esquire’s December issue in front of a webcam, and an on-screen image of the magazine pops to life, letters flying off the cover. Shift and tilt the magazine, and the animation on the screen moves accordingly. Robert Downey Jr. emerges out of the on-screen page in 3-D, offering half-improvised shtick on Esquire’s latest high-tech experiment for keeping print magazines relevant amid the digital onslaught. Esquire’s top editors are clearly enthused about the new technology, called “augmented reality.”

It’s enough of a challenge to launch a new subscription movie channel in an industry segment dominated by the likes of HBO and Showtime. However, Epix, which begins life Friday, starts its adventure with a double feature of sorts: It will also offer a Web streaming version of its channel. That means Epix’s Chief Digital Officer Emil Rensing will have a busy Halloween, making sure the user experience for those potential paying customers will be more treat than trick as they seek other alternate forms of entertainment on their PCs.

ICANN’s decision on Friday to allow domain names in non-Latin characters may have been a move to forestall fragmentation of the Internet. “Not introducing international domains would mean that alternate root servers will be set up around the world because the demand is so high,” Tina Dam, senior director for IDNs at ICANN, told TechNewsWorld. ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is a nonprofit company that’s responsible for the global coordination of domain names and IP addresses.

The Android mobile operating system is graduating soon to 2.0 status, and Google gave it a pretty nice present to celebrate: a free turn-by-turn navigation app called “Google Maps Navigation.” It’ll run on Android 2.0 phones with GPS, and it’ll use the phone’s cellular Internet connection to get live map information. There’s a wide range of quality out there when it comes to smartphone nav apps, but the features Google mentions make its program sound like one of the better ones.

A couple of days ago, a friend was trying to key my email address into his aging feature flip cellphone. He was muttering about how painful the process was and how stupid the phone was, and he remarked that he was getting a new phone for his birthday — can’t wait. Me, being the tech-curious guy I am, asked him what he wanted. “I don’t know,” he asked. “What do you recommend?” “Who’s your service provider — AT&T, Verizon … ?” “Verizon.” And here’s where my answer deviated from an iPhone 3GS recommendation to the new Motorola Droid.

When the Verizon Droid from Motorola arrives next month, it will include a new version of the Android Operating system. Android 2.0, also known as “Eclair,” will no doubt show up in lots of other new smartphones over the coming months. Android 2.0 ushers in a host of new features. Perhaps the one that sparks the most interest is its native support for Microsoft Exchange. “Native support for Exchange will appeal to traditional BlackBerry users that want to access their work email,” Chris Hazelton, a research director at the 451 Group, told LinuxInsider.

A tweet and a status update tell Facebook’s story after a week of very unsociable social media slip-ups for Mark Zuckerberg’s company. The tweet: “Dear Facebook: Stop sucking, you’re making Twitter look reliable.” The status update: “[Name withheld] knows FB has its downside, but I just got friended by somebody that, to me, makes Facebook totally worthy [sic] it!!!” And there you have it. For every time Facebook makes you want to toss your netbook across the room, you hear from a long-lost somebody.

Talk of a flu pandemic has evolved into a bit of flu panic. Rumors fly as some people die and others deny. Much of this fevered buzz is on and around the Internet. The fear that the Internet itself will crash is growing. The alarm is based on the presumption that as the flu spreads, so does the base of home telecommuters, placing such a burden on the Internet that the whole World Wide Web will topple. But is that fear a true possibility? The U.S. government seems to think the scenario is not only possible, but probable.

Intel and Numonyx on Wednesday announced what they categorized as a “key breakthrough” in research on phase change memory. Their researchers demonstrated a 64MB test chip that lets manufacturers stack multiple layers of PCM arrays within one die. This could lead to the creation of smaller memory devices with more capacity and lower power consumption for RAM and storage. The development is the result of joint research between Numonyx and Intel focusing on multi-layered or stacked PCM cell arrays.

Footage leaked from “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2″ reveals that players of the upcoming video game can shoot innocent civilians in an airport in a realistic rendering of a terrorist attack. The game, which has an “M” rating for mature audiences, comes out next month in what its publisher hopes may be the most lucrative launch in the history of entertainment, not just for games but counting music and movies too. In a statement, game publisher Activision Blizzard said Wednesday the footage was taken illegally.

It’s been about a decade since the first practical MP3 players started popping up, and 10 years is plenty of time to collect a positively bloated library of digital music. Perhaps you got in at the ground floor with Napster in ‘99 and loaded up on free tunes before the music industry decided to do something about it. Maybe you remain a proud pirate, Bay or no Bay. Or perhaps one lonely weekend in 2006 you went to a quiet, dark place and set about ripping every single CD, cassette, record album and 8-track tape you’ve ever owned.

You know it’s going to be a good week when it kicks off with news that the Obama administration has officially embraced the open source content management system Drupal. Just a few days later, the Department of Defense issued an almost glowingly positive memo on open source software. “The government is acting intelligently. I feel strange,” quipped Zarf on Slashdot. “And thus another chair is thrown in Redmond,” wrote hrimhari.
Just goes to show, never underestimate the power of freedom!

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