Shipping worldwide in spring this year, the Tritton SwitchBlade features Bluetooth connectivity, and will come with rechargeable batteries and a docking station that lets you pair with a couple of devices simultaneously, so that you can connect with the PS3 in addition to another device like a smartphone. Not only that, the SwitchBlade comes with a folding boom mic so that you can turn the device on or off through the simple action of flicking the mic.

There’s a feature war brewing in the synchronous listening space. Turntable.FM-competitor LetsListen today added video chat to its music locker web app so you can listen to a song at the same time as a friend, but also chat with them via text, audio, or video.

It’s a more intimate shared experience than just watching avatars dance around, but will video chat convince you to spend all day staring at your music player?

Here’s how I see LetsListen, Turntable.FM, and Facebook tackling synchronous listening from different angles.

• LetsListen - A primary experience where you actively video chat with friends as you play songs for each other, as well as a music locker where you can store, manage, and access MP3s.
• Facebook’s “Listen With” – a passive experience seamlessly integrated into Facebook’s Chat feature and music partner apps like Spotify, with notifications and its unified message product making it easy to leave on in the background and just check in when friends are talking.
• Turntable.FM – Somewhere in between, where public rooms fill with head-nodding avatars to grab your attention but you don’t see your friends’ faces. If you’re not looking you might miss chat messages.

When I spoke at Social Media Week with Turntable.FM founder Seth Goldstein about the future of music. I asked whether he thought of his product as a primary or passive experience. RadioSurvivor transcribed how Goldstein lamented,

“I wish it was more background. I think there are a lot of passive services that aim to be more engaging. We have the opposite problem. It’s really engaging for a small community. You go in and you get addicted, and spend four days of your life not doing much of anything else. And then you say, ‘I just can’t do this any more. I’ve got to get back to my life.’”

I worry LetsListen could have the same problem. Video chat is fun to play with occasionally, but the service needs to work great without me looking at it to become something I use all day, everyday. Turntable.FM’s first-mover advantage means it could overshadow LetsListen by adding its own video chat.

If LetsListen is going to win this war, it needs to marry the passive and primary experiences. Most critically, it should add browser tab notifications to show when you’ve received chat messages or a friend starts video chatting with you. The existing audible notifications annoyingly interrupt the music. Then I can passively groove with LetsListen, but pop back in when friends are throwing me Ozzy Osbourne devil-horns over video chat.

Moral ambiguity, thy name is advertising. How are we to parse this advertising campaign in London in which an intelligent bus stop billboard only displays its content to women? You read correctly: the billboard has a camera that scans passersby and if one stops to look, it determines their sex and shows them a 40-second video if they are female. Males only get a link to the advertiser’s website.

Now, does it change things if the advertiser is Plan UK, a non-profit organization trying to raise money towards the education of girls in third-world countries? And they don’t show men because they wanted to give them “a glimpse of what it’s like to have basic choices taken away”? Whether you find this commendable or reprehensible, you have to admit that the technology and implications are more than a little interesting.

TechCrunch isn’t really the venue for the discussion of gender politics, so we’ll abstract this one level and look at the campaign from another angle. First, the installation cost £30,000 for a two-week placement, so it’s not like these are going to start appearing on every street corner. And the system claims a 90% accuracy rate, a figure that is perhaps optimistic. The 10% of people mistaken for the opposite sex will be somewhat unhappy.

Incidentally, here’s the video that 90% of females and 10% of males will see:

But think about the possibilities if you aren’t using some sensitive information as your content arbiter. What if you load up a hundred videos of people in different outfits, and then match that to whatever the person viewing the ad is wearing? “Nice red blazer. But we like this one better. Only $ 25 at H&M.” Or perhaps an advertisement aimed at people with children or holding babies.

In this case, the ad’s form of tailoring the experience is to exclude people. Useful for making a statement, but not so much for driving sales or donations.

One thing is sure: this particular campaign is going to raise hell, and the companies behind it are going to be answering calls and emails for months. Plan UK’s CEO, Marie Staunton, says:

Millions of girls across the globe are being denied the right and choice to have an education. This ad is a deliberate attempt to raise public debate on this issue. Although we’re not giving men and boys the choice to see the full ad on this occasion – so we get a glimpse of what it’s like to have basic choices taken away – boys and men play a vital role in helping girls to be all they can be.

It may also raise public debate on the nature of advertising. That’s probably a good thing, considering ads have been more or less the same since they first gained traction in the 19th century. Sometimes a controversy like this is a powerful way of moving things forward.

You can learn more about the campaign here and donate if you like — or give the organization some feedback.

The Swipe gesture was an indispensable function for power-Tweeters back in the day, so I never really understood why Twitter killed it off in the first place. Thankfully, Swipe’s been resurrected a just-released update for both iOS and Android apps. And those aren’t the only changes. More »

The SLIM series also feature Intelligent Brightness Control, an ECO function to minimize power consumption, and Casio’s “LASER & HYBRID Light Source and DLP technology that provides Lamp-Free, eco-friendly data projection at a fraction of the cost of traditional projectors.” Brighter output and more energy efficient? Now that’s progress! Hit the gallery to check out more photographs of the projectors. The new SLIM projectors will go on sale for $999.99 to $1,499.99 – no word on a release date at time of writing.