Archive for January, 2010

What you’re seeing in the industry’s reaction to the iPad is nothing less than future shock. For years we’ve all held to the belief that computing had to be made simpler for the “average person.” I find it difficult to come to any conclusion other than that we have totally failed in this effort....
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The Jobs formula, say colleagues, relies heavily on tenacity, patience, belief and instinct. He gets deeply involved in hardware and software design choices, which await his personal nod or veto. via Steve Jobs and the Economics of Elitism – NYTimes.com.
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Keep scrolling … scrolling … scrolling … Funny! I’m sure it’s a glitch that will soon be worked out. Even Google makes the occasional mistake.
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The bet is roughly that the future of computing: 1. has a UI model based on direct manipulation of data objects 2. completely hides the filesystem from the user 3. favors ease of use and reduction of complexity over absolute flexibility 4. favors benefit to the end-user rather than the developer or other vendors...
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We are no longer just consumers of content, we have become curators of it too. If someone approached me even five years ago and explained that one day in the near future I would be filtering, collecting and sharing content for thousands of perfect strangers to read — and doing it for free —...
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News flash: “If we cannot become profitable, our financial condition will deteriorate, and we may be unable to achieve our business objectives,” the company wrote in its filing. via Motricity files for $250 million IPO.
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Without a formal announcement, Amazon.com has started allowing authors to publish their ebooks for the Kindle without digital rights management (DRM), the technology that limits how consumers can use the ebooks they’ve bought. The change appears to have gone in effect around Jan. 15, when a few Kindle publishers spotted changes in Amazon’s Digital...
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While Microsoft and Apple are still bitter rivals, several recent events have inadvertently brought them closer together in order to fight their common enemy: Google. The phrase “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” comes to mind. Let’s explore how we got to this tipping point. via Google Is Now Apple’s Greatest Enemy:...
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On Wednesday night, the Wall Street Journal reported that Apple's newest gadget could be a hub for all kinds of media: magazines, newspapers, books, text books, music, games, and video. All of that has been speculated about before, but the target demographic and the primary use for the device–which falls somewhere between a smartphone...
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Washington state high-school students can now opt out of certain traditional elective classes at their schools, instead taking a limited number of online courses in game design, 3-D animation, video production and other technology subjects. The for-credit classes, free to most students, supplement normal core courses, allowing students to stay enrolled in their high...
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We have analyzed data for 13 countries, for business buyers, and even for voters. My colleagues and I have done profiles for over a hundred clients, profiling Walmart shoppers, non-profit donors, and doctors. In all that time, only one thing has been bugging me: there was no place for Twitter. We fixed that today:...
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At the time, we would also send designs and screenshots by email – needless to say, things would get lost – hardly anything would get done on time, and the most common reply I would get back is that they missed the particular instruction in the mass of emails I would send. To compound...
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These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn,...
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ITASoftware.com, which provides the technological backbone for many airfare shopping sites, allows users to scan an entire month’s fares for the least expensive rate. (Log in as a “guest” and click on “month-long search.” ) In January, the 28th and 30th were the cheapest dates to fly nonstop to London from New York ($536)...
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C.S.H.B. 4294 amends the Education Code to authorize use of the state textbook fund for the purchase of technological equipment. The bill requires the commissioner of education to adopt a list of electronic textbooks and instructional material that conveys information to the student or otherwise contributes to the learning process. The bill authorizes a...
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