Google Doodle Moog Synthesizer music for Songwriters Circle http://songwriterscircle.co.uk/synth-music-songwriters/
-
I posted to distributedresearch.net
Google Doodle Moog Synthesizer music for Songwriters Circle…
http://distributedresearch.net/news/google-doodle-moog-synthesizer-music-for-songwriters-circle/
13 Hours, 20 Minutes ago | Comments »
-
I posted to andyroberts.me
Google+ Hangout for Podcast #47
http://andyroberts.me/podcast/google-hangout-for-podcast-47
For this week’s podcast I wanted to experiment with using Google+ , a new(ish) social networking site which has a feature they call “hangout” for bringing groups of people together by video link. It’s kind of like a group video call with a text chat, so superficially not that disimilar really to the ustream and livestream systems that I’ve been using for the weekly Tuesday night broadcasts up until about April this year. Do you need a Google+ invitation? Click here The Google+ service as a whole is getting a lot of attention even though it only launched to the public this month, and even though the circles metaphor can be a bit cumbersome, there’s a tendency towards fuller conversations and better discovery that makes it interesting for musicians, I think. But all that could change as the new platform develops, we’ll have to see. What intrigues me though, is the way that Google is integrating many of their popular services together, and Google of course is behind youTube. I’ve been waiting for youTube “Live” to open up but for the time being that seems to be open only to a few international TV stations. There is some confusing talk about youTube live being available on Google+ hangouts but thsi always turns out to be about taking the existing youTube live streams and relaying them into a Hangout, rather than using the Hangout to generate a new livestream that can be relayed out into youTube live, and saved as youTube videos in a channel, which the direction I’m probably looking for. Google+ Hangout So we planned to try out the ‘Hangout’ feature within Google+, this Sunday afternoon just gone at 3.00pm, and the result has been incorporated into this Andy Roberts podcast episode #47. Google+ Hanging out If you wanted to take part in future Google+ events with me, or just listen in as it happens, then you would need to activate a Google+ Profile if you don’t already have one, and add me to a circle. Again, if you need a Google+ invitation you can get one here Sunday Afternoons, 3.00pm Oh yes, and the other thing that’s changed is that we’ve moved to Sunday afternoons for the regular weekly spot, at 3.00pm UK time, which is currently GMT+1 with daylight saving. That’s 10pm in Beijing. The Sunday afternoon 3.00pm time slot will continue throughout the month of August.
Podcast 47 Here’s the download and play link etc: Subscribe to the podcast RSS or get it from iTunes Download MP3 to save – 39.69 Mb in size, playtime 28 minutes 49 seconds :- 47 Andy Roberts Podcast Episode 47.mp3 Andy Roberts Podcast #47 Shownotes Show Notes for Podcast 47
Mondura Dam Work is Done Shifting Sands Hesitation Blues (trad?) Home – Roy Harper (Part Song) Mozambique – Bob Dylan The Same Old Rock – Roy Harper (Part Song) Narrow Boats
- Tags:
- video
- Roy Harper
- Andy Roberts
- mozambique
- Narrowboats
- youtube
- Mondura Dam
- Shifting Sands
- ustream
- podcast
- Work Is Done
- sunday afternoon
- hang out
- hanging out
- hangout
- hangouts
- social networking site
August 9 2011, 1:13pm | Comments »
-
I posted to distributedresearch.net
Amazing Alex Calder Logo on Google
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/07/22/amazing-alex-calder-logo-on-google
Today is apparently Alexander Calder’s 113th Birthday and to celebrate, Google have replaced the usual search logo with one of their frequent commemorative logos (doodles), in this case an interactive 2d representation of one of Alex Calder’s famous mobiles.Also, note the shadow below the search box and buttons, and on some laptops, if you rock the laptop from side to side, the mobile moves and swings, making use of the inbuilt accelerometer (Not on iPad though)Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogAmazing Alex Calder Logo on GoogleRelated posts:SearchWiki from Google is LIVEAt last google reader has a search boxGoogle vs Yahoo
- Tags:
- Art
- youtube
- calendar
- search
- birthday
- Interactive
- Mobile
- alex calder
- Alex Calder Logo
- Alexander
- alexander calder
- Calder
- logo
- logos
July 22 2011, 2:04am | Comments »
-
I posted to distributedresearch.net
New Google Groups New features
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/07/20/new-google-groups-new-features
New Google Groups New featuresSome important changes coming to Google Groups:• Spam improvements • Support for more [40!] languages • Topic starring • Simplified discussion interfaceNew Google Groups has been around since last year, as a preview.Suggestions:https://www.google.com/moderator/?icon&expr#16/e=a42e8Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogNew Google Groups New featuresRelated posts:Flickr Groups – Is there really a community?When will Google+ allow people to add their own feeds?Google+ Asymmetric Sharing
- Tags:
July 20 2011, 6:29am | Comments »
-
I posted to distributedresearch.net
When will Google+ allow people to add their own feeds?
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/07/07/when-will-google-allow-rss-feeds
When if at all, will Google+ allow people to add their own RSS feeds?Friendfeed took off when rooms were added, harnessing the power of the so-called social interest graph, but it started to lose appeal again when they allowed the automated inclusion of rss feeds into those rooms by the room owners, slowly drowning out the interesting and genuine conversations.Facebook allows the automated inclusion of feeds via 3rd party apps, but between the Facebook users and Facebook themselves, they have managed to deprecate content from feeds so that original content and human shares take priority over feeds.Now some Google+ users are clamouring for the ability to be able to add their own streams from elsewhere directly into their own circles, which would amount to the same mistake as Friendfeed made. But Google+ hasn’t even enabled some kind of groups, rooms or interests yet, either because they still don’t understand the dynamics of social networks, or because they are rolling out such features in waves, and this one hasn’t arrived yet.Google’s record with groups isn’t a good one. They bought Dejanews, the web interface for usenet newsgroups, one of the original computer facilitated social networks, and did nothing much with it for nearly a decade. Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogWhen will Google+ allow people to add their own feeds?Related posts:Friendfeed for microblogging – a screencast videoReclaim your lifestream feeds with SweetCron softwareFriendfeed and Social Objects
- Tags:
- social media
- web20
- friendfeed
- Community
- Circle
- Usenet
- network
- social networks
- circles
- conversations
- Dejanews
- google users
- graph
- mistake
- newsgroup
- social interest
- streams
July 7 2011, 1:21pm | Comments »
-
I posted to distributedresearch.net
Google+ Asymmetric Sharing
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/07/05/google-asymmetric-sharing
Ross Mayfield attempts to explain the features benefits and disadvantages of the asymmetric sharing model used by the new Google+ network. Visual Guide to Circles in Google+ by @ross View more presentations from Ross MayfieldView more presentations from Ross MayfieldI’m beginning to feel that Google+ is going to become a step up for those who prefer networks, but a further departure for those who prefer groups. It all depends what features they bring in later.My own profile is at http://gplus.to/andyroberts using the vanity url creator at http://gplus.to/Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogGoogle+ Asymmetric SharingRelated posts:Google+ for MobileGoogle cheat sheet – embedded pdf viewer from edocrSearchWiki from Google is LIVE
- Tags:
- andyroberts
- Circle
- network
- Asymmetric
- circles
- gplus
- mayfield
- ross
- Ross Mayfield
- vanity url
July 5 2011, 5:19am | Comments »
-
I posted to distributedresearch.net
Google+ for Mobile
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/07/01/google-for-mobile
I’m liking what I’ve seen so far of Google+ or Google plus, particularly the mobile version which seems like a good place to quickly catch up on a lot of stuff all in one place. roll on the iPad app for it. The “nearby” feature should be really interesting on occasion, but not until a few more people are on there in my local area, which ought to be teeming really.The big questions are who what and whyWho is going to settle in at Google+ not just to take a look around but to make it a home page that is checked often? Just the early adopter drive-by users or a more stable community of normal people?What are we going to do or talk about on Google+ that’s innovative and original?Why would anybody try to migrate all of their friends over to Google+ if they are already ensconced at other social networks?The thing is, it’s all going to change anyway.Add me as aroberts@gmail.com or possibly “+Andy Roberts”Photos - Google+Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogGoogle+ for MobileRelated posts:I Declare Google Reader BankruptcyOpen Social Objects?SearchWiki from Google is LIVE
- Tags:
- social media
- web20
- Andy Roberts
- photos
- iPad
- network
- App
- social networks
- ipad2
- adopter
- gmail
- Mobile
- mobile version
July 1 2011, 4:47am | Comments »
-
I posted to flickr.com
Want to join the project? – Google
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/5886886539/
AndyRob
- Tags:
- uploaded:by=skitch
June 30 2011, 5:17am | Comments »
-
I posted to actionlogr.com
What is an Action Log?
http://www.actionlogr.com/what-is-an-action-log/
Action Log Back in 2008, I came up with the idea of starting an Action Log. The idea was simply that I would jot down on a daily basis, a list of the actions I had taken. I had it in my mind that by actions, I meant visible external steps, intended to have a positive effect. Something that adds to a movement in the direction I’m headed. For example, publishing a blog post, joining a forum and posting an introduction, tweaking a theme or plugin to improve usability, uploading a picture, publishing a video, leaving a useful comment somewhere, these are all considered to be actions for the purposes of Action Logging. On the other hand, doing google searches, reading RSS feeds (without responding), learning and observing are not considered to be actions. Read more: http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2008/04/29/keeping-an-action-log-for-1st-person-research
May 30 2011, 12:55pm | Comments »
-
I posted to distributedresearch.net
Boot up: Facebook’s OAuthpocalypse, Bing friends Facebook, and more
Plus Nvidia boss explains why Android tablets aren’t selling, and Nokia ‘rebrands’ Ovi. Also Facebook and Bing.
This article titled “Boot up: Facebook’s OAuthpocalypse, Bing friends Facebook, and more” was written by Josh Halliday, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 17th May 2011 07.30 UTC A quick burst of 7 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team Facebook’s Own (Smaller) “OAuthpocalypse”: Devs Have 48 Hours To Secure Apps >> TechCrunch “Last night and into today, Facebook has been sending out notices to developers they believe have apps in violation of their policy against sending authentication data to third parties. Those developers have 48 hours to fix their apps or they risk being “subject to one of the enforcement actions” — read: being booted.” Bing Facebook Friends Now Fueling Faster Decisions on Bing >> Bing Community Big move: “Starting today, you can receive personalized search results based on the opinions of your friends by simply signing into Facebook. New features make it easier to see what your Facebook friends “like” across the Web, incorporate the collective know-how of the Web into your search results, and begin adding a more conversational aspect to your searches. Decisions can now be made with more than facts, now the opinions of your trusted friends and the collective wisdom of the Web.” Nvidia CEO: Why Android tablets aren’t selling |>> CNET News “During an earnings conference call, Sanjay Jha, CEO of Motorola Mobility, articulated part of the problem, saying, ‘Consumers want more apps for Android tablets.’That’s not the whole story, according to Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, who I chatted with on Thursday…“”It’s a point of sales problem. It’s an expertise at retail problem. It’s a marketing problem to consumers. It is a price point problem,’ he said, for starters.Though Huang didn’t mention the $499 starting price for the iPad, it was clear that this was a reference point. ‘The baseline configuration included 3G when it shouldn’t have,’he said. ‘Tablets should have a Wi-Fi configuration and be more affordable. And those are the ones that were selling more rapidly than the 3G and fully configured ones,’ he said.He didn’t stop there. ‘And it’s a software richness of content problem,’ he added, echoing Jha’s comments.”3G’s there because Android is a phone OS. Speech by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rt Hon George Osborne MP, at Google Zeitgeist 2011 >> HM Treasury It didn’t sound that content-ful when he read it out, either – open data hirings and cyberattacks apart. Honeycomb has a fighting chance against the iPad >> Techcrunch “Don’t get me wrong: Honeycomb 3.0 on the Galaxy Tab is still buggy as hell. Sometimes I feel like the browser is a game — tap the wrong thing, and you’ll suddenly jump to the bottom of a webpage, or all animations will get sluggish. Even the 3.1 update, which I just tried out on my Xoom and will be available for the Galaxy Tab in a few weeks, doesn’t seem to have fixed all the performance kinks. And Android Market still appears to have fewer than 100 applications optimized for the tablet form factor.“But I think that will change soon.” This must be some strange new meaning of the word “soon” that we’re not familiar with. Then again, they handed out tablets to everyone at Google I/O. Didn’t they do that with Google TV? And look how that’s turned out. Oh. Top 10 awesome Android features that the iPhone doesn’t have >> Lifehacker Numbers 7-10 are unequivocally good, though the top 3 – “control your phone from your computer” (uh?), Flash (hmm) and “App integration” (leads to annoying modal dialogs) we’re less sure about. The evolution of Nokia and Ovi >> Official Nokia Blog “Starting with first services on some of the new Nokia devices in July and August, Ovi services will be rebranded as Nokia services in a transition expected to continue into 2012. Each of the services under the Ovi umbrella will simply be rebranded as Nokia, with no planned disruption to the service roadmaps.“Nokia’s EVP and Chief Marketing Officer, Jerri DeVard explains the shift: ‘We have made the decision to change our service branding from Ovi to Nokia. By centralizing our services identity under one brand, not two, we will reinforce the powerful master brand of Nokia and unify our brand architecture..’” So why was “Ovi” ever chosen if there’s this powerful master brand? The whole situation should become a case study in a book on marketing. You can follow Guardian Technology’s linkbucket on delicious
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogBoot up: Facebook’s OAuthpocalypse, Bing friends Facebook, and more
Related posts:Blog Friends app on Facebook Facebook MySpace and Linkedin friends Blog Friends growth accelerates to 10% a day
- Tags:
- General
- New Features
- technology
- logs
- developer
- conference
- Article
- computer
- iPad
- Blogposts
- content
- Josh Halliday
- Android
- device
- tablet
- iPhone
- Applications
- architecture
- Technology blog
- speech
- application
- Motorola
- authentication data
- Bing
- Boot
- brand
- browser
- facebook friends
- George Osborne MP
- jen hsun huang
- Jerri DeVard
- linkbucket
- Newsbucket
- nvidia
- OAuthpocalypse
- sanjay jha
- Tablets
- third parties
- webpage
May 17 2011, 2:57am | Comments »
-
I posted to distributedresearch.net
Apple studies patent infringement claims by Lodsys
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/16/apple-studies-patent-infringement-claims-by-lodsys
Patent holding firm Lodsys claims revenue from Apple iPhone and iPad 2 app developers, but critics say it is abusing the patent system
This article titled “Apple studies patent infringement claims by Lodsys” was written by Charles Arthur, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 16th May 2011 16.24 UTC Apple’s legal department is understood to be “actively investigating” claims by Lodsys, a patent holding company based in Texas, to have a claim against iPhone and iPad developers who use in-app purchase systems.
So far Lodsys has served papers on about a dozen iOS developers who it says are infringing its patent 10/732,102, which it bought in 2004 from the inventor, who filed it in the 1990s, covering user interaction over a network.
Apple is not expected to respond to the claims, which have been passed to it by affected developers, until later this week.
Lodsys is asking for 0.575% of US revenue for in-app purchase. Although that may not be substantial for individual developers, one told the Guardian: “0.575% of the in-app purchase market across all platforms would be a very nice figure to have indeed. And, of course, it’s 0.575% for this patent today. Tomorrow it’s another 1% from some other company, and so on.”
Lodsys says that Apple has licensed the patent covering in-app purchasing – but adds that it can still claim for payments that use the technology in developers’ own apps. “The scope of [Apple's] licences does not enable them to provide ‘pixie dust’ to bless another third-party business applications [sic]. The value of the customer relationship is between the Application vendor of record and the paying customer,” notes the blog’s author, believed to be Lodsys‘s chief executive, Mark Small. “The operating system is acting as an enabler and the retailers are acting as a conduit to connect that value.”
In a series of blog posts, the company notes that Google and Microsoft have taken out licences, but notes that “so far no one has asked” whether apps written on those platforms might be liable for licence fees.
A number of iOS developers received couriered documents last week from Lodsys claiming payments were due following their use of in-app purchases.
The move has worried app developers, who see it as a dangerous and slippery slope where they become liable for payments to third parties after using the in-system APIs that they are required to by the mobile OS company. Apple does not allow apps that use other systems for purchasing to be sold through its app store, and Google is also tightening its rules on app APIs.
Lodsys is also suing a number of larger companies including Samsung, Brother, HP and Motorola Mobility.
Lodsys comments on its blog that:
“There are lots of bills in life that it would be preferable to not pay if one didn’t have to. Lodsys is just trying to get value for assets that it owns, just like each and every company selling products or services is, trying to do business and make a profit. It’s odd that some of the companies that received notices had such a visceral reaction. Some of these companies have our favorite apps, for which we paid the asking price. We realise you have to get paid for your work and so do we.”
One developer told the Guardian: “They do imply they’ve have a horrible weekend, but then again, I seem to be the one who hasn’t slept properly since Friday, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the one who sent the letters in the first place! It feels very hypocritical for them to paint themselves as the victim here.”
Florian Mueller, who has tracked patent disputes in the US and EU, suggests on his blog: “Lodsys is trying to abuse the patent system in a way that could ultimately destroy the entire mobile apps economy, which is not only thriving on its own but has been and continues to be a key factor in making new mobile devices so useful and popular.”
He says: “It’s actually questionable whether Lodsys’s patents would survive a well-funded effort to have them declared invalid,” adding: “Even if they could be upheld under the system as it stands, there’s no way that those patents represent a fair deal between society and” Lodsys, which bought them from the inventor.
Mueller fears that if Lodsys prevails it will buy more patents and use them against small app developers who would be unable to defend themselves; and other companies would follow its business model, “shaking trees for money that you just can’t lose because your opponents can’t even defend themselves”.
The risk to the mobile app economy is huge, says Mueller, and this move by a small, relatively unknown company might be the final straw needed to get the mobile companies, including Apple – which is the largest mobile phone vendor in the world by revenue – to lobby the US administration finally to do something positive about software patents. The problem is, what?
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogApple studies patent infringement claims by Lodsys
Related posts:Forget Google – it’s Apple that is turning into the evil empire Smartphone competition heats up as HTC closes in on Apple Iran claims London 2012 Olympics logo spells ‘Zion’
- Tags:
- General
- Computing
- apple
- software
- mobile phone
- technology
- developer
- business
- market
- News
- Article
- research-and-development
- Apps
- iPad
- Smartphones
- Technology sector
- Apple iPhone
- iPhone
- Applications
- platforms
- Mobile phones
- Law
- Apps blog
- economy
- Charles Arthur
- iPad 2
- Microsoft
- App
- application
- Company
- Intellectual property
- inventor
- iOS
- Lodsys
- Motorola
- pixie dust
- Samsung
May 16 2011, 11:39am | Comments »
-
I posted to distributedresearch.net
How the iPad revolution has transformed working lives
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/27/how-the-ipad-revolution-has-transformed-working-lives
Fifteen million iPads were sold last year. As iPad 2 launched, Charles Arthur looked at the impact of tablet computers on the way we relate to technology, and five users tell us about how the iPad is feeding into the way they work.
This article titled “How the iPad revolution has transformed working lives” was written by Charles Arthur and Killian Fox, for The Observer on Sunday 27th March 2011 00.05 UTC A friend recently went to a business meeting. He prepared by pulling his laptop out of his bag. All of the clients responded by taking their iPads out of their briefcases. These were not gadget freaks or latte-quaffing Hoxton-based web designers, as some imagine iPad users to be. They were a large group of senior civil servants and bankers, in a country well beyond Europe and the US. To them, the iPad wasn’t a status symbol; it was a device they had chosen to use because it enhanced their ability to do their job. A year on from its arrival, and with the faster, thinner, second-generation model released in the UK on 25 March , Apple’s iPad tablet computer still divides opinion. A large group of people insist it is an “overpriced toy” with limited functionality – no keyboard, doesn’t run Microsoft Office, can’t play Flash video, can’t expand its storage. But a growing number believe that, on the contrary, the iPad represents a new frontier in computing. And they simply don’t care what the first group thinks. They’re getting on with using their machines. We have lived with the PC paradigm for around 30 years now, since IBM introduced its first personal computers and pushed them into businesses in the early 80s. Until the launch of the iPad last year the only comparable change in the market had been the laptop, which led to the emergence of an army of travelling salespeople whose most urgent need was always to find a power point where they could charge their machine’s fading battery. The iPad seems to be different – a third stage of computing. Horace Dediu, a former analyst with the mobile phone company Nokia who now runs his own consultancy, Asymco, argues that “the definition of a new generation of computing is that the new products rely on new input and output methods, and allow a new population of non-expert users to use the product more cheaply and simply”. That certainly sounds like the iPad. It shows that it is possible to have something that does all the computing functions you want with a big screen that also has long battery life and weighs almost nothing, certainly compared to a laptop. It is portable and durable, and the touch screen adds another dimension. Though it has the most prominent tablet in the market, Apple isn’t the only player (see its rivals assessed below). Dozens of companies are using Google’s free Android software to power tablets, and Google is helping them along with a custom version called “Honeycomb”, designed for iPad-sized Android tablets. An estimated 17 million tablets – from Apple and others – were sold in 2010, and that number is likely to keep growing. But is it really changing the way we work? We interviewed a range of people in different professions to see whether the iPad is all hype – or whether in future we will all keep taking the tablets. CA Margaret Manning – businesswoman Margaret Manning first realised that her iPad was going to change how she worked when she was in hospital, recovering from a minor operation, about a month after buying it. “I realised I could comfortably do emails, download a book to read, watch a film, whatever,” she says. “There’s no other device that you can do that with. You certainly can’t read with a laptop in bed.” Manning, 50, is the founder and chief executive of Reading Room, a London-based web development agency employing 170 people. She takes the iPad with her to client meetings and presentations: “It’s got a wow factor,” she says. “I did a presentation that I ran off it, and all the people in the room went, ‘Ooh’,” she recalls, adding: “They were all bankers.” To Manning, the iPad’s chief virtue is its versatility. She can carry it in her bag to go to clients, check work emails in a coffee shop or train, and then take it to a bar later and kill some time playing a game. It’s become her laptop, TV screen, iPod and iPhone. “It’s adaptive to today’s digital age. You can create and consume content in a different way.” Key to that is the screen size. “The iPhone was a step towards this, but the format is vital. This allows businesses to start using it in a way they couldn’t with the iPhone.” She cites an app that Reading Room has developed for Grains Research Development Corporation in Australia which lets farmers examine crops for disease by comparing them, in the field, to pictures on the iPad. That could be done on a laptop – but it would be cumbersome compared to doing it on the handheld screen. She revels in the simplicity of the interface, and says battery life is key: “If it was shorter, that would change the relationship. If I had to travel with plugs and extra batteries that would change things. The iPhone’s battery life is too short – it hacks me off.” Are there any drawbacks? “There are two things that it doesn’t do well: the keyboard – if I travel with it, I have to take a lightweight keypad – and voice calls. You can use Skype [the free internet voice call service], but not everybody has Skype, and I can’t use it to call a client. ” CA Frasier Speirs – teacher “Nobody has lost a file for a year now,” says Fraser Speirs. “Which used to happen every week – someone coming along and saying they couldn’t find where they’d saved some work or other.” Speirs teaches computing studies at the private Cedars School of Excellence in Greenock, and is also the IT co-ordinator there. Last year he went to his bosses with a radical plan: equip every one of the children in both the primary and secondary schools with an iPad. And not just for computing studies: for every lesson. Speirs wants them to replace textbooks, though he admits that is still some way off. But the iPads, with their simplified approach to filing (you can’t choose where to save a file), have made at least part of his life much simpler. The lack of a keyboard wasn’t an issue. “The problem with laptops in the classroom is the battery life, and the size and weight. When Apple said that it would last for 10 hours, and we realised it actually did, that was really important. And the size and weight matters too for younger children.” The primary pupils only use them in school; secondary pupils can take them home. And teachers have them too, which has changed their view of computing. Speirs thinks it is time to reconsider how and what we teach children in an internet-connected world. “Previously, we taught technology just for business needs – Excel, PowerPoint. But now technology is there to assist learning. What do we teach, when you can look up facts in two seconds flat? The answer I think is much more about challenge-based learning, where you give the pupils a high-level goal, and have the teacher support them in achieving it.” But what happens when those children leave school and encounter laptops and even desktops in businesses? Speirs isn’t worried for them. Children starting at Cedars now will graduate in 2024, he points out – and any company still using desktops by then will be hopelessly behind the curve. CA Richard Bowman – physicist Will the iPad soon become a fixture in science labs alongside Bunsen burners, microscopes and graduated cylinders? Richard Bowman, a 24-year-old physicist doing his PhD at the University of Glasgow, reckons so. His field is optics, and in partnership with colleagues at the University of Bristol he recently developed an app that allows users to manipulate microscopic objects simply by touching the iPad’s screen. Before iTweezers, Bowman employed a desktop computer and a mouse to control optical tweezers, an instrument that traps and moves microscopic particles using laser beams. Now, he does it all on his iPad. “It’s quite a natural interface,” he says. “It’s like you’re touching the actual particle and pushing it around. We can also move particles up and down with the pinch gesture, which is hard to do with a mouse.” It may be some time before iTweezers appears on the market – “there are loads of intellectual property issues” – but Bowman has already had interest from scientists in various fields, including chemists at Glasgow University who are using it in experiments with crystals. In the meantime, he’s developing a more commercially viable iPad app called LabVIEW with his colleagues in Bristol: “It puts virtual dials and sliders on the screen to let you control your experiments in the lab”. One serious limitation of the iPad, according to Bowman, is that “Apple are quite restrictive in what they’ll allow to run on it. You have to register as an Apple developer and use their tools to do things.” But, he adds, “I think the iPad is definitely here to stay – its capabilities are increasing all the time – and multi-touch interfaces definitely are the future. If you can control several things at once, it means you can interact with your experiment better, it can happen faster, and you can do things that you couldn’t do before.” KF David Kassan – painter When David Kassan bought an iPad last spring, his intention was to use it simply as a portfolio to show to prospective clients in the art world. Kassan, 34, is a Brooklyn-based artist who paints “really realistic lifesize figures” using oils on wood panel, and the iPad, he says, is “like a perfect art portfolio. You can adjust the colours, it’s a cool thing to hold, and it’s easier to update than a printout. That’s the reason I got it.” But on a trip to Europe last summer, Kassan started messing around with the ultra-basic Brushes app on his iPad. “I sketched people in subways and airports, and did studies of paintings in museums. I started using it as a completely portable, full-colour sketchbook. It meant I didn’t have to bring watercolours or an easel with me. I could just slide it out of my bag and start using it.” Now he finds himself painting much more when out and about. “I’m an observer of everything – that’s my job – and the iPad is a great tool to see things around me and be able to record them so that my eye gets keener. Also, if I’m in a museum I can do a study of the colour of a painting, not just the drawing and compositional aspects, which is all I’d really get to understand with pencil and paper.” Kassan believes that the device has improved his “real painting”, but does this mean that the paintings he does on the iPad will never qualify as “real”? Actually, he says, “I’m working on a piece right now, a lifesize head that I’m trying to do exactly like my real paintings.” Using a more advanced app called Artrage and a Nomad touch-screen paintbrush, he hopes “to make it as realistic as possible, print it up and sign it. I thought I might put it in my next solo show in October to see what it’ll sell for.” KF Richie Hawtin – musician/ DJ Early last year, the DJ and producer Richie Hawtin was putting together a live show to mark 20 years of Plastikman, the most prominent of his many musical alter egos. Due to its scope, the show posed a considerable challenge to the British-born techno megastar. “When you do an electronic performance, traditionally you have a mixing board with all these knobs and faders to create the sound,” he explains. “For this show, each song called for a whole different set of knobs and faders.” What Hawtin needed, in order to control all those diverse environments at once, was a touch-screen device. The iPad came out in April. Within two months, Hawtin and his team had integrated it into the Plastikman performances. Six months later, they formed a company, Liine [www.liine.net], to turn the apps they’d developed into commercial products. One of these apps, Griid, “allows you to navigate a musical environment that would be hundreds of screens deep if you were trying to look at it on a normal laptop. With your hand movements you can zoom from left to right, find the instrument and the melody that you want, and start, stop or modify it with a quick touch.” Another app, Kapture, “allows you to take snapshots of different states of your performance. If something amazing comes together, you can capture that moment just by touching the screen, and return to it later. Then you can then morph all these moments of the show together.” Both apps interface with the popular Ableton Live sequencing software and can be used in the studio as well as onstage. Harnessing touch-screen technology, Hawtin says, is like “following a dark path with a torch and stumbling upon new techniques. The show has evolved into something that we didn’t even realise was possible.” Being able to use both hands on a screen, rather than being tethered to a mouse and keyboard, “transfers a bit more of your spirit into the technology you’re using”. Ever the restless techno-pioneer, Hawtin is now looking forward to future devices “that can sense not only left or right movements but how much pressure you’re applying to the screen. That, as far as musicians like me are concerned, will be the next huge development.” KF
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogHow the iPad revolution has transformed working lives
Related posts:Apple’s slice makes the iPad a bad deal for newspapers While you were sleeping.. Australians end long wait for iPad 2 iPad 2 queues start 33 hours early as demand expected to beat supply
- Tags:
- London
- General
- Computing
- apple
- Green
- Features
- download
- technology
- developer
- apples
- ICT
- Airport
- Airports
- Launch
- revolution
- Article
- culture
- The Observer
- The New Review
- Apps
- iPad
- Tablet computers
- Android
- development
- iPhone
- Discover
- control
- art world
- Euro
- Charles Arthur
- briefcases
- business meeting
- ExCel
- gadget freaks
- HD
- ipads
- iPod
- Killian Fox
- microsoft office
- salespeople
- second generation
- status symbol
- tablet computer
- web designers
March 27 2011, 4:51am | Comments »
-
I posted to distributedresearch.net
Music video website Vevo to launch in the UK
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/16/music-video-website-vevo-to-launch-in-the-uk
Music video website Vevo featuring 30,000 music videos of acts including Lady Gaga and Rihanna could be made available this month.
This article titled “Music video website Vevo to launch in the UK” was written by Dan Sabbagh in Abu Dhabi, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 16th March 2011 11.35 UTC The world’s leading online music video site is planning to launch in the UK in the next few weeks, in the latest attempt by the industry to develop new sources of revenue. Vevo, which launched in the US in 2009, carries around 30,000 music videos which are syndicated to sites such as YouTube on a free-to-view basis. Rio Caraeff, the chief executive of Vevo, told the Abu Dhabi Media Summit that the site was “planning to launch in the UK imminently” with some sources indicating a launch could come as soon as this month. Partly owned by two of the four music majors – Vivendi’s Universal Music and Sony Music – Vevo aims to provide advertisers a sanitised online environment for videos from the likes of Lady Gaga and Rihanna against which they can place their advertising. Vevo’s argument is that it is risky for household names to be associated with the full range of YouTube’s content, because so much of the user generated material on the Google-owned site is of varying and uncertain quality. Music promos are among the most popular online videos. Vevo is ranked as the No 1 online music video destination by comScore, reaching 51 million unique visitors in January, marginally ahead of MTV and other Viacom properties on 48 million. Vevo is backed by the Abu Dhabi Media Company, and also features music from EMI, home to Katy Perry and Tinie Tempah, although the British music major is not a shareholder. Warner Music is not involved with Vevo – but is involved in a competing alliance with MTV. Caraeff said Vevo would also become available in the Middle East and north Africa in the coming months, with other European countries, Brazil and Australia following “in the second half [of 2011] and beyond”. • To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. • If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly “for publication”.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogMusic video website Vevo to launch in the UK
Related posts:Is VIDEO on Flickr better than youTube? New music: Marques Toliver – Deep in My Heart Earthquake in Japan triggers Tsunami – Video
- Tags:
- Music
- youtube
- technology
- Launch
- Media
- News
- Article
- culture
- household
- Digital media
- british music
- Dan Sabbagh
- lady gaga
- music promos
- rihanna
- sony music
- video site
- video website
March 16 2011, 7:21am | Comments »
-
I posted to distributedresearch.net
The internet is over
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/15/the-internet-is-over
Oliver Burkeman went to Texas to the South by Southwest festival of film, music and technology, in search of the next big idea. After three days he found it: the boundary between ‘real life’ and ‘online’ has disappeared.
This article titled “SXSW 2011: The internet is over” was written by Oliver Burkeman, for The Guardian on Tuesday 15th March 2011 08.00 UTC If my grandchildren ever ask me where I was when I realised the internet was over – they won’t, of course, because they’ll be too busy playing with the teleportation console – I’ll be able to be quite specific: I was in a Mexican restaurant opposite a cemetery in Austin, Texas, halfway through eating a taco. It was the end of day two of South by Southwest Interactive, the world’s highest-profile gathering of geeks and the venture capitalists who love them, and I’d been pursuing a policy of asking those I met, perhaps a little too aggressively, what it was exactly that they did. What is “user experience”, really? What the hell is “the gamification of healthcare”? Or “geofencing”? Or “design thinking”? Or “open source government”? What is “content strategy”? No, I mean, like, specifically? The content strategist across the table took a sip of his orange-coloured cocktail. He looked slightly exasperated. “Well, from one perspective, I guess,” he said, “it’s kind of everything.” This, for outsiders, is the fundamental obstacle to understanding where technology culture is heading: increasingly, it’s about everything. The vaguely intimidating twentysomethings who prowl the corridors of the Austin Convention Centre, juggling coffee cups, iPad 2s and the festival’s 330-page schedule of events, are no longer content with transforming that part of your life you spend at your computer, or even on your smartphone. This is not just grandiosity on their part. Rather – and this is a technological point, but also a philosophical one – they herald the final disappearance of the boundary between “life online” and “real life”, between the physical and the virtual. It thus requires only a small (and hopefully permissible) amount of journalistic hyperbole to suggest that the days of “the internet” as an identifiably separate thing may be behind us. After a few hours at South by Southwest (SXSW), the 330-page programme in my bag started triggering shoulder aches, but to be honest it was a marvel of brevity: after all, the festival was pretty much about everything. We’ve been hearing about this moment in digital history since at least 1988, when the Xerox technologist Mark Weiser coined the term “ubiquitous computing”, referring to the point at which devices and systems would become so numerous and pervasive that “technology recedes into the background of our lives”. (To be fair, Weiser also called this “the age of calm technology”, implying a serenity that the caffeinated, Twitter-distracted masses in Austin this week didn’t seem yet to have attained.) And it’s almost a decade since annoying tech-marketing types started using “mobile” as an abstract noun, referring to the end of computing as a desktop-only affair. But the arrival of the truly ubiquitous internet is something new, with implications both thrilling and sinister – and it has a way of rendering many of the questions we’ve been asking about technology in recent years almost meaningless. Did social media cause the recent Arab uprisings? Is the web distracting us from living? Are online friendships as rich as those offline? When the lines between reality and virtuality dissolve, both sides of such debates are left looking oddly anachronistic. Here, then, is a short tour of where we might be headed instead: Web 3.0
“Big ideas are like locomotives,” says Tim O’Reilly, a computer book publisher legendary among geeks, embarking on one of the grand metaphors to which the headline speakers at SXSW seem invariably prone. “They pull a train, and the train’s gotta be going somewhere lots of people want to go.” The big idea O’Reilly is touting is “sensor-driven collective intelligence”, but since he coined the term “Web 2.0″, he seems resigned to people labelling this new phase “Web 3.0″. If Web 2.0 was the moment when the collaborative promise of the internet seemed finally to be realised – with ordinary users creating instead of just consuming, on sites from Flickr to Facebook to Wikipedia – Web 3.0 is the moment they forget they’re doing it. When the GPS system in your phone or iPad can relay your location to any site or device you like, when Facebook uses facial recognition on photographs posted there, when your financial transactions are tracked, and when the location of your car can influence a constantly changing, sensor-driven congestion-charging scheme, all in real time, something has qualitatively changed. You’re still creating the web, but without the conscious need to do so. “Our phones and cameras are being turned into eyes and ears for applications,” O’Reilly has written. “Motion and location sensors tell where we are, what we’re looking at, and how fast we’re moving . . . Increasingly, the web is the world – everything and everyone in the world casts an ‘information shadow’, an aura of data, which when captured and processed intelligently, offers extraordinary opportunity and mindbending implications.” Alarming ones, too, of course, if you don’t know exactly what’s being shared with whom. Walking past a bank of plasma screens in Austin that were sputtering out tweets from the festival, I saw the claim from Marissa Mayer, a Google vice-president, that credit card companies can predict with 98% accuracy, two years in advance, when a couple is going to divorce, based on spending patterns alone. She meant this to be reassuring: Google, she explained, didn’t engage in such covert data-mining. (Deep inside, I admit, I wasn’t reassured. But then Mayer probably already knew that.) The game layer
Depending on your degree of immersion in the digital world, it’s possible that you’ve never heard the term “gamification” or that you’re already profoundly sick of it. From a linguistic point of view, the word should probably be outlawed – perhaps we could ban “webinar” at the same time? – but as a concept it was everywhere in Austin. Videogame designers, the logic goes, have become the modern world’s leading experts on how to keep users excited, engaged and committed: the success of the games industry proves that, whatever your personal opinion of Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft. So why not apply that expertise to all those areas of life where we could use more engagement, commitment and fun: in education, say, or in civic life, or in hospitals? Three billion person-hours a week are spent gaming. Couldn’t some of that energy be productively harnessed? This sounds plausible until you start to demand details, whereupon it becomes extraordinarily hard to grasp what this might actually mean. The current public face of gamification is Jane McGonigal, author of the new book Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better And How They Can Change The World, but many of her prescriptions are cringe-inducing: they seem to involve redefining aid projects in Africa as “superhero missions”, or telling hospital patients to think of their recovery from illness as a “multiplayer game”. Hearing how McGonigal speeded her recovery from a serious head injury by inventing a “superhero-themed game” called SuperBetter, based on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in which her family and friends were players helping her back to health, I’m apparently supposed to feel inspired. Instead I feel embarrassed and a little sad: if I’m ever in that situation, I hope I won’t need to invent a game to persuade my family to care. A different reaction results from watching a manic presentation by Seth Priebatsch, the 22-year-old Princeton dropout who is this year’s leading victim of what the New York Times has labelled “Next Zuckerberg Syndrome”, the quest to identify and invest in tomorrow’s equivalent of the billionaire Facebook founder. Priebatsch’s declared aim is to “build a game layer on top of the world” – which at first seems simply to mean that we should all use SCVNGR, his location-based gaming platform that allows users to compete to win rewards at restaurants, bars and cinemas on their smartphones. (You can practically hear the marketers in the room start to salivate when he mentions this.) But Priebatsch’s ideas run deeper than that, whatever the impression conveyed by his bright orange polo shirt, his bright orange-framed sunglasses, and his tendency to bounce around the stage like a wind-up children’s toy. His take on the education system, for example, is that it is a badly designed game: students compete for good grades, but lose motivation when they fail. A good game, by contrast, never makes you feel like you’ve failed: you just progress more slowly. Instead of giving bad students an F, why not start all pupils with zero points and have them strive for the high score? This kind of insight isn’t unique to the world of videogames: these are basic insights into human psychology and the role of incentives, recently repopularised in books such as Freakonomics and Nudge. But that fact, in itself, may be a symptom of the vanishing distinction between online and off – and it certainly doesn’t make it wrong. The dictator’s dilemma
Not long ago, according to the new-media guru Clay Shirky, the Sudanese government set up a Facebook page calling for a protest against the Sudanese government, naming a specific time and place – then simply arrested those who showed up. It was proof, Shirky argues, that social media can’t be revolutionary on its own. “The reason that worked is that nobody knew anybody else,” he says. “They thought Facebook itself was trustworthy.” This is one of many counterintuitive impacts that the internet has wrought on the politics of protest. But perhaps the most powerful is the one that Shirky – himself a prominent evangelist for the democratic power of services such as Twitter and Facebook – labels “the dictator’s dilemma”. Authoritarian leaders and protesters alike can exploit the power of the internet, Shirky concedes. (At least he notes the risks: in another session at the conference, I watch dumbstruck as a consultant on cyber-crimefighting speaks with undisguised joy about how much information the police could glean from Facebook, in order to infiltrate communities where criminals might lurk. Asked about privacy concerns, she replies: “Yeah – we’ll have to keep an eye on that.”) But there’s a crucial asymmetry, Shirky goes on. The internet is now such a pervasive part of so many people’s lives that blocking certain sites, or simply turning the whole thing off – as leaders in Bahrain, Egypt and elsewhere have recently tried to do – can backfire completely, angering protesters further and, from a dictator’s point of view, making matters worse. “The end state of connectivity,” he argues, “is that it provides citizens with increased power.” The road to that end state won’t be smooth. But the compensatory efforts of the authorities to harness the internet for their own ends will never fully compensate. Either they must allow dissenters to organise online, or – by cutting off a resource that’s crucial to their daily lives – provoke them to greater fury. Biomimicry comes of age
The search engine AskNature describes itself as “the world’s first digital library of Nature’s solutions”, and to visit it is to experience the curious, rather disorienting sensation of Googling the physical universe. Ask it some basic question – how to keep warm, say, or float in water, or walk on unstable ground – and it will search its library for solutions to the problem that nature has already found. The idea of “biomimicry” is certainly not new: for much of the past decade, the notion of borrowing engineering solutions from the natural world has inspired architects, industrial designers and others. Austin is abuzz with examples. “Nissan, right now, is developing swarming cars based on the movements of schooling fish,” says Chris Allen of the Biomimicry Institute. Fish follow ultra-simple mathematical rules, he explains, to ensure that they never collide with each other when swimming in groups. Borrow that algorithm for navigating cars and a new solution to congestion and road accidents presents itself: what if, in heavy traffic, auto-navigated cars could be programmed to avoid each other while continuing forwards as efficiently as possible? The Bank of England, he adds, is currently consulting biologists to explore ways in which organic immune systems might inspire reforms to the financial system to render it immune to devastating crises. “And what we’re looking for now,” Allen says cryptically, “is an interactive technology inspired by snakes.” ‘We are meant to pulse’
Until recently, the debate over “digital distraction” has been one of vested interests: authors nostalgic for the days of quiet book-reading have bemoaned it, while technology zealots have dismissed it. But the fusion of the virtual world with the real one exposes both sides of this argument as insufficient, and suggests a simpler answer: the internet is distracting if it stops you from doing what you really want to be doing; if it doesn’t, it isn’t. Similarly, warnings about “internet addiction” used to sound like grandparental cautions against the evils of rock music; scoffing at the very notion was a point of pride for those who identified themselves with the future. But you can develop a problematic addiction to anything: there’s no reason to exclude the internet, and many real geeks in Austin (as opposed to the new-media gurus who claim to speak for them) readily concede they know sufferers. One of the most popular talks at the conference, touching on these subjects, bore the title Why Everything Is Amazing And Nobody Is Happy. A related danger of the merging of online and offline life, says business thinker Tony Schwartz, is that we come to treat ourselves, in subtle ways, like computers. We drive ourselves to cope with ever-increasing workloads by working longer hours, sucking down coffee and spurning recuperation. But “we were not meant to operate as computers do,” Schwartz says. “We are meant to pulse.” When it comes to managing our own energy, he insists, we must replace a linear perspective with a cyclical one: “We live by the myth that the best way to get more work done is to work longer hours.” Schwartz cites research suggesting that we should work in periods of no greater than 90 minutes before seeking rest. Whatever you might have been led to imagine by the seeping of digital culture into every aspect of daily life – and at times this week in Austin it was easy to forget this – you are not, ultimately, a computer.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogThe internet is over
Related posts:The world wide web is shrinking What to make of this 56 Sage Street app Music business models for internet artists
- Tags:
- web20
- internet
- politics
- open source
- Randomness
- Features
- technology
- festival
- conference
- Opera
- The Guardian
- Article
- Psychology
- Clay Shirky
- nudge
- Comment & features
- G2
- New York Times
- facial recognition
- Marissa Mayer
- SXSW
- SXSWi
- Games
- addiction
- content strategist
- Freakonomics
- gamification
- Interactive
- Jane McGonigal
- Mobile phones
- Oliver Burkeman
- Seth Priebatsch
- south by southwest
- Syndrome
- technology culture
- teleportation
- venture capitalists
- Web 20
- Zuckerberg
March 15 2011, 4:07am | Comments »
-
I posted to distributedresearch.net
Google’s Marissa Mayer on the location-based ‘fast, fun and future’
Marissa Mayer of Google products expounds at SXSW on Google and the proliferation of products. Where will it all go next?
This article titled “Google’s Marissa Mayer on the location-based ‘fast, fun and future’” was written by Josh Halliday, for guardian.co.uk on Saturday 12th March 2011 17.18 UTC Dubbed “the gatekeeper of Google products”, Marissa Mayer knows what she’s talking about. Ultimately, it falls at Mayer’s door to ensure the internet giant remains as agile, innovative and willing to experiment as it was a decade ago. “The challenge is how to stay true to what originally built this big and successful brand, with a lot of experimentation and still moving really fast,” Mayer said on Friday. “Now, when new people come in [to Google] who say their products are ‘not good enough for the Google name’ you have to tell them that the Google name was built on building stuff, throwing it out there, getting feedback, seeing how it works, ramping it up, making it a success and then managing resource afterwards.” What you end up with, then, is a proliferation of products. This is where Google has fallen short, Mayer admitted. “Some of our products should be features, like Latitude and Google Hotpot,” she said. “One of the things we need to do more is merge these products into core technologies, consolidate into Maps or Places. There’s probably more than one product [Latitude and Hotpot could fit into] but we still need to condense somewhat.” Mayer, an upwardly mobile Stanford University graduate who joined the Mountain View company almost 12 years ago, also admitted that Google Maps needs some form of customer support. (Late last year, Nicaragua refused to withdraw troops from a disputed parcel of land along its border with Costa Rica after Google Maps wrongly labelled it Nicaraguan territory.) “We do need to have some support there, and step up our customer service,” Mayer said. About 40% of Google Maps usage is local, according to Mayer, with 150 million people using the mobile Google Maps. (And drivers across the world travel 12bn miles a year using Google Maps navigation – who needs satnav?) Location-based services, including new releases of Maps for mobile, check-ins, deals and augmented reality, are evolving into quintessentially Google products. The world of “contextual discovery” – organising information, reviews and deals around a given location – is the local play on Google’s longest-standing ambition. Asked by the Guardian how Google manages to assuage privacy fears with cutting-edge consumer products, Mayer said that its Street View technology had got “better and better at blurring” licence plates and other opt-outs. Mayer said Google is “transparent” about the data it needs to inform its products, adding: “There are actually a lot of places that have a lot of data about you that people don’t know. I read the other week that credit card companies know with 98% accuracy two years before that you’re going to get divorced – that’s crazy. “But it means that there’s things that you don’t even know about, like changes in your spouse’s buying power. The real question is: because that data’s always been there but now it’s been recorded, the question is how are they handling it?”
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogGoogle’s Marissa Mayer on the location-based ‘fast, fun and future’
Related posts:Location Independent Working Location Independent Again Google maps
- Tags:
- social media
- tools
- internet
- apple
- software
- map
- Features
- technology
- Media
- The Guardian
- Article
- culture
- Blogposts
- Digital media
- Josh Halliday
- platform
- Festivals
- Marissa Mayer
- PDA
- SXSW
- SXSWi
- Technology blog
- core technologies
- customer service
- customer support
- google maps
- Google Street View
- internet giant
- Location based services
- Mapping technologies
- mountain view
- Nicaragua
- proliferation
- stanford university graduate
- upwardly mobile
March 14 2011, 6:28am | Comments »
-
I posted to distributedresearch.net
Forget Google – it’s Apple that is turning into the evil empire
If Google is the new Microsoft, is Apple the new Google or is it Facebook? Well no, not exactly. Google Apple facebook
This article titled “Forget Google – it’s Apple that is turning into the evil empire” was written by John Naughton, for The Observer on Sunday 6th March 2011 00.18 UTC Once upon a time, when Apple was mainly a computer manufacturer, people used to liken it to BMW. That was because it made expensive, nicely designed products for a niche market made up of affluent, design-conscious customers who also served as enthusiastic – nay fanatical – evangelists for the brand. It was seen as innovative and quirky but not part of the industry’s mainstream, which was dominated by Microsoft and the companies making the PCs that ran Windows software. This view of Apple was summed up by Jack Tramiel, the boss of Commodore, when Steve Jobs first showed him the Macintosh computer. “Very nice, Steve,” growled Tramiel. “I guess you’ll sell it in boutiques.” That was a long time ago. Now, with a market capitalisation of just over $331bn, Apple is the second most valuable company in the world – bigger than Microsoft ($220bn), Oracle ($167bn) or Google ($196bn). The quirky little computer company has grown into a giant. But not necessarily a giant of the Big Friendly variety, as the world’s magazine publishers have recently discovered and as the music and software industries have known for some time. For Apple now controls the commanding heights of the online content business and it looks like doing the same to the mobile phone business. At the moment, it looks as though nobody has a good idea of how to stop it. Every year, Fortune magazine polls a sample of US CEOs asking for their opinions of their competitors. The results for 2011 have just been released and they show that Apple is the “most admired” company in America. This is the sixth year in a row that it has held that title. The reasons are obvious. On the product side, Apple creates beautifully designed, highly functional and user-friendly devices that delight customers and provide fat profit margins; it has a corporate culture that reliably delivers these products by specified dates; it’s much more innovative than any of its competitors; and it has a unique mastery of both hardware and software. On the strategic side, the company has displayed a deep understanding of technology and a shrewd appreciation of potential devices and services for which people will pay over the odds. Most CEOs would kill to run a company that possessed a quarter of these competencies. Apple appears to have them all. Its current dominance is built on three big ideas. The first is that design really matters. It’s not something you can outsource to a design consultancy – which is what most companies do – and design is as much about ease of use as it is about aesthetics. The second insight was that the maelstrom of illicit music downloading triggered by Napster couldn’t last and that the first company to offer a simple way of legally purchasing music (and, later, other kinds of content) online would clean up. And third – and most important – there was the insight that mobile phones are really just hand-held computers that happen to make voice calls and that it’s the computing bit that really matters. Most of the media commentary about Apple attributes all of these insights to Steve Jobs, the company’s charismatic co-founder, on the grounds that Apple’s renaissance began when he returned to the company in 1996. This may well be true, though it seems unlikely that such a comprehensive corporate recovery could be the work of a single individual, no matter how charismatic. What’s more plausible is that Apple’s corporate culture took on some of the characteristics of its CEO’s personality, much as Microsoft was once a corporate extension of Bill Gates, with all that implied in terms of aggression and drive. Whatever the explanation, the fact is that Apple now has a dominant position in several key businesses (content distribution and mobile computing) and is having a seriously disruptive impact on the mobile phone industry. In particular, its iTunes Store gives it control of the tollgate through which billions of paid-for music tracks and albums, videos and apps cascade down to millions of customers worldwide. It levies a commission on everything that passes through that gate. And every Apple mobile device sold can only be activated by hooking up to the gate. This gives Apple unparalleled power. Lots of other organisations offer paid-for downloads, but none has the credit card details of so many internet users who are accustomed to paying for stuff online. This was one reason why proprietors of print magazines began to slaver when the iPad appeared. Here at last was a way of getting people to pay for online content: just make it available on iTunes and let Apple collect the money. Sure, it rankled that Apple took 30%, but – hey – at least it would bring to an end the parasitic free riding that was endemic on the web. Henceforth, the web was dead: publishing magazines as iPad apps was the future. Then Apple abruptly changed the rules, stipulating that any publisher selling a digital subscription on a website must also make the same subscription offer within the app, from which Apple would take a 30% cut. Publishers have been furious about this, but there’s nothing they can do about it. If they want to do business on the iTunes store, then they have to do it Apple’s way. In itself, this was just an example of the Big Unfriendly Giant flexing its muscles, but it could be a harbinger of things to come. Umberto Eco once wrote a memorable essay arguing that the Apple Mac was a Catholic device, while the IBM PC was a Protestant one. His reasoning was that, like the Roman church, Apple offered a guaranteed route to salvation – the Apple Way – provided one stuck to it. PC users, on the other hand, had to take personal responsibility for working out their own routes to heaven. Eco’s metaphor applies with a vengeance to the new generations of Apple iDevices, which are rigidly controlled appliances. You may think you own your lovely, shiny new iPhone or iPad, but in reality an invisible virtual string links it back to Apple HQ at One Infinite Loop, Cupertino. You can’t install anything on it that hasn’t had the prior approval of Mr Jobs and his subordinates. And if you are foolish enough to break the rules and seek your own route to salvation, then you may find when you next try to sync it with iTunes that it has turned into an expensive, beautifully designed paperweight. If that isn’t power, then I don’t know what is.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogForget Google – it’s Apple that is turning into the evil empire
Related posts:Smartphone competition heats up as HTC closes in on Apple ( OpenID + MS ) vs Google London Google Maps mashup with what’s on listings
- Tags:
- social media
- tools
- Computing
- apple
- Mac
- technology
- business
- Giant
- Comment
- The Guardian
- UK news
- Article
- Main section
- The Observer
- John Naughton
- Comment is free
- industry
- billions
- Publishing
- Bill Gates
- computer manufacturer
- evil empire
- fortune magazine
- jack tramiel
- macintosh computer
- magazine publishers
- market capitalisation
- mobile phone business
- niche market
- software industries
- Steve Jobs
March 5 2011, 6:28pm | Comments »
-
I posted to distributedresearch.net
Smartphone competition heats up as HTC closes in on Apple
Will the iPad 2 really be announced out on Wednesday? Yes, it appears so. How much will it weigh? “more tablets than Mesopotamia” lol.
This article titled “Smartphone competition heats up as HTC closes in on Apple” was written by Dominic Rushe, for The Observer on Sunday 27th February 2011 00.06 UTC According to his business card, John Wang is a wizard. Chief innovation wizard to be precise. He certainly seems to be working his magic at HTC, the Taiwanese firm where he oversees new products at a company that is rapidly becoming one of the hottest brands in tech. This week is set to be another Apple week – the second generation of the iPad is expected to be unveiled on Wednesday. But in the UK the biggest-selling launch is likely to be HTC’s. The hyperbolically named HTC Incredible S is Wang’s latest smartphone and has received glowing reviews so far in the tech press. Later this year HTC will launch its iPad rival, the Flyer. With tech firms churning out more tablets than ancient Mesopotamia, Wang says the Flyer will not be another “me-too” device. “Whatever we do has to be quietly brilliant,” he says. He says the Flyer was designed to weigh the same as the average paperback book (420 grammes), about half the weight of an iPad, and will be far smaller. And while it will be a touch-screen device, Wang says it won’t be defined by touch – users will be able to draw and write notes on any part of the device. The aim, he says, is to produce something different, something that produces “moments of delight”. In order to get to these moments HTC has a “magic lab” where ideas are worked through. One idea from the lab is a technology that makes its smartphones ring loudly in a bag or pocket, but softly when picked up. Wang started the lab five years ago and its engineers work through ideas to make their devices as simple and user-friendly as possible. The Incredible S, for example, has buttons that change their orientation depending on which way the phone is held. “When people use the word innovation they are often referring to the 1.5ghz, the 4.4in display, megapixels,” he says. “But it’s often the details, not the specifications that make customers think ‘that is so right’.” The strategy seems to be paying off. According to technology analysts Gartner, HTC sold 3m smartphones in the UK last year, compared with Apple’s 5m. In the last quarter of the year HTC sold 1.1m, close to Apple’s 1.4m. Overall, the company made a net profit of $500m (£310m) for the last quarter of 2010, a leap of 160% from 2009′s final quarter. Sales surged 153% from a year ago. The firm, formerly known as High Tech Corporation, started life in 1997 making notebook computers. It has been building a position in smartphones for years, but Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi says the turning point for HTC was the launch of Google’s Android mobile operating system in 2007. The success of Android and HTC’s close co-operation with Google gave the firm a new lease of life in mobile. Google and HTC are close partners: the search giant’s team used HTC phones when they were developing Android. Initially Android looked like a dud, but it now outsells all its competitors combined in the US. Next up is the tablet, where Google is also keen to make its mark. “I think we are just at the beginning for innovation in the tablet market,” says Wang. Graham Stapleton, chief commercial officer for Carphone Warehouse and Best Buy, said the retailer had seen enormous growth in HTC sales in recent months. “Their customer traditionally has been more of a business/professional user. In the last 12-18 months they’ve targeted more of the pioneering customers, people who want the latest technology.” He said HTC was becoming a brand people asked for unprompted. “That’s a huge change. They’ve done an incredible job over the last 18 months.” It hasn’t gone unnoticed. HTC and Apple are now locked in a patent spat, with each side accusing the other of ripping it off. Milanesi says that’s the price of success. “Can Apple go after Google? No, they don’t make phones. They will go after who they can go after,” she says. It’s probably the biggest compliment Apple is ever likely to pay them.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.
Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogSmartphone competition heats up as HTC closes in on Apple
Related posts:Apple’s slice makes the iPad a bad deal for newspapers Quarter of a racehorse for sale BBC NEWS ¦ Business ¦ Indian firm ‘eyeing UK graduates’
- Tags:
- UK
- US
- Computing
- apple
- Pictures
- Mac
- Features
- technology
- business
- competition
- Article
- Main section
- corporation
- The Observer
- computer
- iPad
- Android
- Carolina Milanesi
- Carphone
- device
- Dominic Rushe
- Graham Stapleton
- John Wang
- Mesopotamia
- notebook
- Smartphones
- strategy
- tablet
- Technology sector
- Warehouse
February 27 2011, 8:05am | Comments »
1 2
