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.
Secretly, I suspect, we technologists quite liked the idea that Normals would be dependent on us for our technological shamanism. Those incantations that only we can perform to heal their computers, those oracular proclamations that we make over the future and the blessings we bestow on purchasing choices.
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.
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 — I would have responded with a pretty perplexed look. Yet today I can’t imagine living in a world where I don’t filter, collect and share.
“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.
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 Text Platform. A new option gave publishers the choice to “not enable digital rights management.” A science-fiction author named Joseph Rhea appears to have been the first to notice the change. On Jan. 15, Amazon announced an expansion of its Digital Text Platform to non-U.S. authors, but made no mention of DRM changes.
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.
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 and a laptop–has been more of a mystery. Now it seems we’re starting to have a clearer picture: the device has been purposely designed to be shared between members of a household as easily as possible, according to one of the Journal’s unnamed sources.
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 schools while taking some elective classes their schools do not offer.
It's all possible through a new partnership, announced earlier this month, between the White Salmon Valley School District and Giant Campus, a national online technology-education company.
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:
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 my trouble, we were collaborating across multiple time zones – UK, US Pacific Time, Indian time and Singapore time. Emails would arrive in the night and it is depressing to wake up to 35 new emails from different people.
Then I got my google wave invite. First of all, I didn't really get it. I was not really sure how this would help me. However, after I had a skype conference and one of my partners complained for 15 minutes about how I would write unimportant emails like
“I need a status update next week”
I decided to try something new. All emails that were NOT time critical would be done with google wave, and all important emails could be written normally. We started off doing that.
Things changed.
Suddenly, communication habits of everyone changed. People started grouping their communication into topics and resurrecting old 'waves' when it was about the same topic. For example, if we were talking about bonuses, and then spoke about something else for two weeks, then came back to bonuses, we would simply resurrect the old wave. Business became structured.
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, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.
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) for a week’s vacation, according to a recent search. The next best was Saturday, Jan. 23, at $640. To book the ticket, users must go to another site. Kayak.com has a flexible-dates option (registration is required) and a calendar that shows the best fares found by other Kayak users in the last 48 hours. Bing Travel, the Microsoft search engine, offers a similar option, found under “plan trips,” about halfway down the page.
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 school district to select an electronic textbook or instructional material on the commissioner's list to be funded by the state textbook fund.
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
I'm a software exec who cares about UX and UI, scours web & social media, lives in Canada, plays hockey, uses a Mac (mostly). Oh, and I blog and speak at conferences.
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
