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
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Google+ for Mobile
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/07/01/google-for-mobile
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July 1 2011, 4:47am | Comments »
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I posted to youtube.com
In the forest at Theydon Bois with iPad
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXk4Gc1b6eA&feature=youtube_gdata
June 14 2011, 8:09am | Comments »
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I posted to flickr.com
iPad 2
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aroberts/5804395747/
AndyRob
iPad 2
June 6 2011, 11:00am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
My new Ubuntu-flavoured ThinkPad is computing heaven
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/23/my-new-ubuntu-flavoured-thinkpad-is-computing-heaven
As antidote to all the iPad2 hype, Cory Doctorow is pleased with his Lenovo ThinkPad X220, pleased as punch about how undramatic, yet graceful, his computing life has becomeThis article titled “My new Ubuntu-flavoured ThinkPad is computing heaven” was written by Cory Doctorow, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 17th May 2011 07.21 UTCThis week, I finally got my new Lenovo ThinkPad X220, the latest and skinniest in the Lenovo X-series of fast, skinny, rugged, all-black, no-nonsense machines. This – my third X-series ThinkPad – is shaping up to be everything I expected from the line and more: it is slim, 2.5cm (1in), configured with its smallest battery and very light – 1.5kg (3lbs 4oz) or so; size up to the biggest battery and you get eight or nine hours of work at a mere 1.8kg; snap on the “Slice” battery, which snugly fits underneath the machine, fattening it up to 4cm, and the weight goes to 2.5 kg – but the Slice delivers about 24 hours of continuous operation without plugging in.I haven’t yet taken the machine on the road, but 24 hours’ worth of battery means that I’ll be able to leave my mains adapter at home for the next all-day conference or travel day, which saves weight overall. It’s got a 64-bit, 2.7GHz Sandy Bridge processor, 8GB of RAM, and I’m about to slap in a 600GB Intel solid-state drive that’ll increase its speed and battery life even more.I had some snags getting this machine in, partly because of supply-chain problems with Japanese components from factories affected by the tsunami and earthquake, and partly attributable to Lenovo’s less-than-stellar ordering system, which stands in sharp contrast to the quality of its machines.I switched to ThinkPads full time in 2006, after owning practically every model of Apple PowerBook released to that date, starting with a PowerBook 145 in 1992 or so. They were generally good machines, design-y, and they ran the Mac OS, which was the only operating system I used on my desktop. I’d administered various flavours of Unix before then – some Silicon Graphics Irix machines, a couple Apple A/UX machines, and then a series of GNU/Linux servers – but by the time I bought my first ThinkPad, I hadn’t done anything Unix-y in years and couldn’t do much of anything without intense search-engine assistance.My ThinkPad switch was inspired by a desire to try out the Ubuntu flavour of GNU/Linux, which I’d heard great things about. So I downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu – Canonical, the company that oversees Ubuntu, does two releases per year – burned it to a CD and stuck it in the computer, and, a few minutes later, I was up and running. At the time, I promised to document my joys and frustrations with GNU/Linux, but a few months later, once I’d been soaking in the OS for a while, I went back over my notes and discovered that there was practically nothing to report on that score.For a week or two I did a lot of mis-mousing and mis-typing as I learned where Ubuntu’s equivalents to MacOS commands were. A few years later, I experienced the exact same sensation after we redid our kitchen and the builders insisted that regulations required us to move our cutlery and dishes to new places and I spent two weeks opening the cutlery drawer and finding myself looking at a load of pots and pans.One day, I woke up and I just knew where everything was, which is exactly what happened with my Ubuntu switch.The problem with writing about switching to Ubuntu is that there’s very little to report on, because it is just about the least dramatic operating system I’ve used, especially when paired with the extended warranties Lenovo sells for its ThinkPads. By this I mean that Ubuntu, basically, just works as well as or better than any other OS I’ve ever used, and what’s more, it fails with incredible grace.This graceful failure is wonderful stuff, and after a lifetime of using computers I’ve decided that it’s the thing I value most in my technology. Ubuntu is free – free as in beer, costing nothing; free as in speech, in that anyone can modify or improve it. That means that on those occasions where I’ve had a bad disk or some other problem, I could simply download a new copy of the OS, stick it on a USB drive and restart from the drive to troubleshoot and repair the OS. I don’t have to take a rescue disk on the road with me, don’t have to try to run out to the Apple store at 8:55PM to try to buy another copy of the OS before the shop closes. Anywhere I’ve got a working computer and an internet connection, I’ve got everything I need to fail gracefully.Ubuntu is a GNU/Linux “distribution” – that is, a carefully curated collection of free tools, gathered together, tested and packaged so as to provide an elegant, coherent computing experience. In this regard, it’s not so different from any other OS. There is a committee of design-oriented, thoughtful people who make aesthetic and technical decisions about what I should be doing with my computer and put them all together – this committee includes passionate users, developers and Canonical employees. Ubuntu has its own version of an App Store, though Ubuntu’s version, derived from a GNU/Linux project called Debian, has been around for years longer than the Apple, Android and Microsoft versions. Practically everything in it is free – and it’s been tested and reviewed and described to a nicety, so that whenever you have a need you can just search the Ubuntu Software Centre for something to solve your problem, evaluate the small list of returned options, find the app you want, click and install. If you don’t like it, you can install another.But this free business has serious knock-on effects in the graceful failure department. Ubuntu’s Software Centre can be instructed to spit out a simple list of all the apps (“packages” in Ubuntu-speak) you’ve installed. Any time you need to set up a new machine or recover an old one, you simply feed the list to the package manager and it will fetch all your apps and install and configure them without any further intervention. This is nothing short of miraculous when compared with the clumsy, desperate fumbling with original disks and serial numbers from the commercial software world. That’s what free-as-in-beer gets you.But free-as-in-speech also delivers benefits to the failing computer and its user: any time you want to do something with your computer that Canonical hasn’t countenanced (or has rejected), it’s pretty trivial to do so. You don’t have to jailbreak Ubuntu to get it to run unapproved software. In fact, Ubuntu allows you to add programs from unapproved third parties with the same Software Centre, and hooks those programs up to its automatic updater. For example, I subscribe directly to the updates to Banshee, an excellent, powerful, free, open replacement for iTunes. These updates tend to be a little ahead of the official Ubuntu releases, where each revision is tested before it is packaged and updated.This is “curated computing” at it absolute best: you get all the benefits of obsessive, bold design from a closely coordinated team that shares a coherent vision for the way the computer works. But you also get to disagree with them as much or as little as you want. You can sit down and use Ubuntu and it will get out of your way and just let you do whatever you want your computer to do for you, with no drama. But when you find the need to tinker, Ubuntu reveals as much configurability as you could care for, starting with installing unapproved programs and drilling all the way down to rewriting parts of the OS if you have the ability and desire to do so. It’s a system you can trust, but not a system that you must trust.I must disclose that Ubuntu’s founder, Mark Shuttleworth, once made a donation to my former employer, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which helped fund my position at the time – there were no conditions attached to this funding – and that he subsequently personally commissioned a short story from me. Neither of these interactions had any bearing on my decision to try and continue using Ubuntu – I tried the OS on advice from Google’s Chris DiBona, and continued to use it due to my overall great experiences with the technology.Speaking of great experiences, I mentioned the Lenovo hardware warranty above. This as graceful as failure gets. For £127.44, I get three years’ worth of on-site, next-day, hardware replacement service. I used to keep two Powerbooks on the go at a time so that when one suffered a technical disaster I could switch to the other one while I waited one to three weeks for Apple to fix it. With my ThinkPad, I just call a toll-free number and the next day, or sometimes the day after, a technician comes to my office or hotel room practically anywhere in the world and fixes my computer. This warranty is provided through IBM Global Services – IBM flogged its ThinkPad business to Lenovo years ago, but held on to the services division – and it has been almost impeccable in the three or four times I’ve used it.Nine years ago, I quit smoking. My doctor asked me what I planned to think about when I craved a cigarette. I told him I would concentrate on the health benefits, and he shook his head. “You’re 31 years old. The major health benefit you’re going to get from quitting smoking is that you’re not going to get cancer in 20 or 30 years. That’s not going to shore up your willpower when you crave a cigarette tomorrow.” So I thought about it and realised that I was spending one or two laptops’ worth of money on cigarettes every year. And from then on, whenever I got a cig craving I just thought about all the lovely laptops I’d be able to buy in the years to come by not giving my money to the death merchants whose products were killing me. Every time I get a new lappie now, I get a real thrill, a funny phantom association with good health.I was once a computer hobbyist. I loved to geek out about computers. I can still really get into the subject, but for the most part, I just want to Get Stuff Done with my computer. I am pleased as punch to have arrived at such an undramatic place in my computing life. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogMy new Ubuntu-flavoured ThinkPad is computing heavenRelated posts:SocialSoftwareWiki – Design Patterns of Social ComputingFree FTP Client Software – Using Filezilla to update WebsitesI opened my Mac mini
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May 23 2011, 4:20am | Comments »
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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
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May 17 2011, 2:57am | Comments »
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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.
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May 16 2011, 11:39am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Some things I can’t do on the ipad 2 yet.
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/03/some-things-i-cant-do-on-the-ipad-2-yet
So this is an experimental blog post feeding the output from a mind map directly via email to the blog. The mind map software is ithoughtsHD as recommended by Ed Dale and MacSparky, and it’s an addition to one I made early in order to accumulate some tasks I needed to do when I get back on my iMac again. So the first one was a kind of to do list, which is against the spirit of action logging I know, but sometimes I need the memory aid in special circumstances.
I’ve had an intense unplanned two weeks or so learning curve with my new iPad 2, and it’s been enlightening and fun on the whole, but occasionally frustrating as well. In theory there are only about 20-30% of activities which cannot be done easily on the iPad, but in practice they can soon mount up into a bit of a backlog. I’ve tried to avoid getting involved in really complicated workflows which are basically workarounds to make up for the deliberately isolated structure of the IOS apps system.
Other things I haven’t mentioned are native OSX apps such as Market Samurai, or Firefox plugins, which haven’t been ported to iPad yet, if at all.
The iThoughtsHD output to email process includes a number of different formats and here they are:
cant do on ipad
adding autolinks into wordpress blog posts of course this is a bit like thinks to do on the iMac
the difference being here I might try to find ways to do them on the iPad eventually
podcasts
broadcast with livestream edit sound files in audacity
facebook
leave groups manage pages on 2nd page
Google Reader
add subscriptions unsubscribe
gmail
add filters
WordPress
edit longer posts add categories after the first few in the list
reorganise categories?
cant do on ipad.itm Download this file
cant do on ipad.itmz Download this file
cant do on ipad.opml Download this file
cant do on ipad.pdf Download this file
Andy Roberts
http://distributedresearch.net/blog
via posterous Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogSome things I can’t do on the ipad 2 yet.
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May 3 2011, 9:28am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
The Kindle and the Tube
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/13/the-kindle-and-the-tube
London’s top Underground blogger Annie Mole of Going Underground has noticed a surge in the use of e-readers in the capital’s crowded Tube carriages
This article titled “The Kindle and the Tube” was written by Dave Hill, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 13th April 2011 11.09 UTC This year’s London Book Fair, which ends today, held a session on Sunday called the Digital Future Is Now. A UK publishing executive spoke of the surging US e-book market and how the market had been jump-started by the Amazon Kindle. I don’t have a Kindle yet, but must get round to it. Annie Mole has noticed that there’s one in every Underground carriage these days, and who wants to be left out? Annie observes: It’ll be interesting to see how this picture will change in five years time. How long will it be before we see more people reading from iPads, Kindles or other e-readers than people reading printed books and papers on the Tube?
Not long at all, I’d say. The Tube experience is quite conducive to nourishing Kindle-use. After all, you need elbow room to turn a page. Now read on.
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April 13 2011, 6:18am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
30 new music apps for iPhone, Android and iPad
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/12/30-new-music-apps-for-iphone-android-and-ipad
New iphone iPad and Android apps range from popular artists to social location services aimed at music gig-goers.
This article titled “30 new music apps for iPhone, Android and iPad” was written by Stuart Dredge, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 12th April 2011 09.15 UTC There’s something of an explosion in music apps happening on iPhone and Android at the moment, from official artist apps that look to go beyond pure news and audio samples, through to social location services aimed at gig-goers. Here’s a list of 30 apps that have launched in the past few months, from big stars and startup developers alike. It offers a glimpse at the trends and technologies that make apps as potentially habit-changing for music fans as they are for gamers and TV viewers. Note, this list is focused on apps that involve listening to or interacting around music, rather than actually creating it. Not because the latter isn’t just as interesting – there is a similar boom in innovative music-making apps – but because, well, those apps will sit better in their own list. Meanwhile, the focus on recently launched apps is why the likes of Spotify, Pandora Radio, Last.fm and others are not included. They’re still innovative and important, but this piece is about new contenders in 2011. The History of Jazz This sits alongside The Elements as one of the iPad apps showing that tablet book-apps can be far more than a scanned-in PDF with a bit of extra video. The History of Jazz offers an interactive timeline tracing the chronological history of jazz, with music samples, videos and curated playlists to dive into featured artists’ catalogues. Discovr This is less of a timeline, and more of a flowchart plotting connections between artists whose music is broadly similar. Discovr gets you to type in an artist, then tap your way through the chart of related bands, double-tapping to bring up biographies, videos and blogposts. MusicDrop and BoxyTunes Two apps that both have the same aim – to turn online storage service DropBox into a fully functioning cloud music service. Both MusicDrop and BoxyTunes stream music from your DropBox account, pulling in cover artwork and other information. They will increasingly face competition from pure cloud music services in 2011, but for existing DropBox users they may be a good stopgap. Decoded by Jay-Z This universal app for iPhone and iPad is based on a physical book collecting together rapper Jay-Z’s lyrics, and adding in video interviews. People paying $4.99 for the app can choose 10 of the 36 featured songs to unlock, or pay another $9.99 to unlock all 36. The actual music is not included – the app focuses on lyrics – but if the songs are already on the user’s device, they can be played in sync with the words. BEP360 will.i.am likes apps so much, he started his own development studio to make them. BEP360 was the first app to emerge. It’s described as a ’360 mobile music video’, which gets fans to hold up their iPhone and spin around for a 360-degree view of the video for the Peas’ The Time (Dirty Bit) single. Augmented reality features and photo-sharing are also included, making this an app worth admiring even if you’re not so keen on the music itself. Mike Scanner Part of the promotional effort around the final album by the Streets, Mike Scanner is one of the first artist apps to use the kind of barcode-scanning technology that’s been seen in numerous mobile shopping apps. The idea here: fans scan household items to unlock exclusive music, videos and ticket offers. Erykah Badu As we reported in February, soul singer Badu is the first artist to use the platform of startup FanTrail to try to connect with her fans – although she’s since been followed by the Roots and Quiet Company. The Erykah Badu app brings gamification to music fandom, with users filling up their ‘LoveMeter’ by sharing news with friends, buying music and checking in at gigs. The more full the meter gets, the more personal the recorded voice messages from Badu accessed through the app will be. Lykke Li Scandinavian pop artist Lykke Li’s app uses another platform, from Steam Republic. Here, the innovation is less about gamified rewards, and more about linking the app with her existing website, so fans can create profiles and share content across both. That includes blogposts and photos, while the app also has the now-obligatory gig check-ins feature too. Pocket Hipster We covered this app in February too: it’s a collaboration between two music technology startups, The Echo Nest and We Are Hunted. Pocket Hipster includes two avatar hipsters, who sneer at your music collection and suggest alternatives to listen to. The hipster aspect is for fun, but the recommendation technology is very serious – it uses The Echo Nest’s API, which is being licensed to a range of app and service companies in 2011. we7 Radio Plus Personalised radio is all the rage in the US thanks to Pandora Radio, but licensing arguments led to the company pulling out of the UK a few years ago. That’s left the way clear for Last.fm, and now we7 to see how the concept flies among British music fans. Released for Android this year, we7 Radio Plus creates radio stations on the fly based on specific artists and genres. SoundTracking Released by developer Schematic Labs in time for SXSW this year, SoundTracking lets people share details of the song they’re listening to there and then, including photos and comments. Other users of the app will be able to listen to 30-second samples courtesy of iTunes, and it integrates with Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. Roxette Singbox Who knew Roxette would be the subject of an innovative music game in 2011? That said, who knew the Smurfs would be the subject of one of the most lucrative iPhone social games in 2010… Roxette Singbox brings the SingStar karaoke game model to iOS, using in-app purchases to download individual songs, with email and Facebook challenges for a social spin. Spin Play US music magazine Spin launched an iPad app in March this year, but it went beyond simply reproducing the print edition’s articles. Each $1.99 issue includes a playlist of 60 streaming songs and 30 streaming videos, chosen by the Spin team to complement the editorial content for that issue. The aim is for readers to listen to bands while reading about them. Play by AOL Music Launched for Android smartphones in March, Play by AOL Music is another music discovery app, released by the newly-editorial focused US internet giant. It’s a music player app with social features baked in, enabling people to easily tweet or Facebook share the song that’s currently playing. Friends’ posts and comments are pulled into a real-time feed. Tune Drop and Pioneer Air Jam Everyone’s a wannabe DJ at house parties nowadays, but usually whoever controls the device gets to choose the tunes. Apps are emerging to make the process more collaborative, though. Tune Drop is an iPad app that lets party guests cue up requests from your iPod music library, while Pioneer Air Jam handles the process wirelessly – albeit only for Pioneer hi-fis. Kling Klang Machine Techno pioneers Kraftwerk were similarly innovative with their first iOS application this year, billing Kling Klang Machine as an ‘interactive 24-hour music generator’. Fans can browse a music map of the world divided into timezones, and mix Kraftwerk loops and samples together – overseen by wireframe models of the group itself. DJ Rivals US startup Booyah has had success with its Nightclub City Facebook game and MyTown iPhone social location game. DJ Rivals brings the two ideas together, as players build up their virtual DJ through rhythm mini-games and location-based DJ battles. Roqbot Roqbot won this year’s SXSW Music Accelerator contest, and is another collaborative playlist app, except this time designed to be used in bars and restaurants rather than the home. The iPhone and Android app lets users vote for the songs they’d like to hear, making it an app-centric incarnation of the traditional jukebox. Nirvana Classic Album: Nevermind In itself, this app isn’t technically innovative: it’s basically an existing documentary film ported to iPad, with bonus material and social commenting. However, it’s a sign that labels – Universal Music Group in this case – are keen to see how much demand there is for tablet apps focused on their back catalogues, as well as newer bands. McFly Live – Above The Noise Punk-pop band McFly teamed up with UK firm LoveLive recently, to release an app for a specific gig, rather than the band as a whole. It let fans watch a live stream of their concert at Wembley Arena in early April, while entering a contest and chatting to other fans on a forum. Swedish House Mafia – Until One iPad Edition Scandinavian dance supergroup Swedish House Mafia are already exploring multiplatform content, having released their own book and video documentary around latest album Until One. Now there’s an iPad app too, based on the book and videos, but with all nine tracks of the album streamable from within the app. Impressive technically, but also for the ability of label EMI to get the necessary publishing licensing signed off to include the full tracks. Owl City Galaxy While fans await new material from Owl City, they can dive into his US-only Galaxy application, which offers similar gamification to the Erykah Badu app – points for ‘future Owl City bonuses’. Social is the key feature, with fans invited to ‘customise your own planet and connect with other fans’, with an exclusive track dangled as the reward for doing so. Eavesdrop, MyStream and PairShare These three apps all launched around the same time, aiming to provide a modern-day equivalent of the two headphone sockets found on vintage Walkmans. All three allow people to listen to music at the same time, using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth streaming in the case of Eavesdrop and MyStream, and just Bluetooth for PairShare. AudioVroom Originally developed as part of a Music Hack Day event, AudioVroom styles itself as a ‘multi-user internet radio station’, where people earn points for recommending the app to friends, which can then be spent on listening to ad-free personal radio stations. Foursquare-style badges are thrown into the mix, while the sharing happens using the Bump app’s API, requiring people to physically knock their iPhones together to connect. US-only for now. The National Mall This ‘hyperlocal’ app isn’t much use to fans who don’t live in Washington DC, where US duo BlueBrain reside. The National Mall is an interactive album designed to be listened to on a walk around the National Mall in DC, with the rhythms and beats changing as they go. The app is due out imminently. iheartradio for iPad US radio group Clear Channel’s iheartradio apps have racked up millions of downloads on iPhone and other smartphones, but the newly-released iPad app shows what can be added for larger screens. Listeners can see related tweets when listening to one of the 750 US radio stations streaming within the app, while also perusing videos and photo galleries. That’s our selection, so what do you think? Which of these apps has most potential, and which will sink without a trace? And have we missed anything out that’s been released in 2011? Post a comment to let us know your feedback.
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April 12 2011, 4:54am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
iPad 2: where can I buy one in the UK?
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/30/ipad-2-where-can-i-buy-one-in-the-uk
Supplies of Apple‘s iPad 2 are running perilously short – but more iPad 2s are expected to surface before the weekend.
This article titled “iPad 2: where can I buy one in the UK?” was written by Josh Halliday, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 30th March 2011 15.04 UTC Apple’s iPad 2 has been virtually out of stock in the UK since its launch on Friday. Streams of shiny geeks have been left dissapointed and empty-handed by gadget shops up and down the land. But we have good news. Dixons, PC World and Currys expect to get more iPad 2s in stock today. Most will be going to those who have pre-ordered, but if you hurry you might just be able to buy one over the counter. Fancy that. Argos, meanwhile, has been left woefully short handed. Its 750 stores in the UK and Ireland ran out of stock on Monday – and doesn’t expect to get any more until 25 April. Sounds like a bad April Fools’ joke. At Phones4U, which was reported to have been given just one iPad 2 for each of its 500+ stores, the devices are only “down to the last few”, according to a spokeswoman. No word, yet, on when more will be available. John Lewis, which is famously “never knowingly undersold”, has sold out. The retailer says it will have more of the Apple gadgets in time for the weekend. As does Tesco, which encourages customers to order online. Now, over to you. Tweet @GuardianTech or @JoshHalliday with the store name, location (preferably with the postcode), and whether there are any iPad 2s in stock. We’ll update the map below.
Click here for a larger map.
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March 30 2011, 10:58am | Comments »
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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
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March 27 2011, 4:51am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
While you were sleeping.. Australians end long wait for iPad 2
Australians have been queueing up for the Apple iPad 2 for just as long as Britons – almost two days – and the numbers in the line built up to more than 300 in many locations
This article titled “While you were sleeping.. Australians end long wait for iPad 2″ was written by Charles Arthur, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 25th March 2011 06.29 UTC While you were sleeping, the iPad 2 went on sale in Australia, and it seems to have drawn a lot of attention. This was the queue at 0704am this morning in Sydney…
Photo by BeauGiles on Flickr. Some rights reserved …and this was the queue by sale time at 5pm:
Photo by BeauGiles on Flickr. Some rights reserved (Thanks to Beau Giles in Sydney who took a whole set of pictures through the night. People had been queueing outside the Sydney Apple store for almost two days: some told World News Australia that it’s all about meeting people: Canadian backpacker Alex Lee arrived in Sydney on Wednesday to be first in line to buy Apple’s iPad 2 and has theorised on the phenomenon. “I call it the 90/10 rule for Apple – 90 per cent is about the people, the experience and just the whole feeling and 10 per cent is about the product itself,” the IT consultant said. CNet Australia says there were around 300 people queueing at the Brisbane story in Chermside and that they had started at around 5.30am that morning. Large queues were also seen in Hobart. And lest you think it’s only a game for the whippersnappers, the Australian newspapers found Sally Johnson, aged 73, who “may be hot and tired, but that hasn’t deterred her from queueing…” (It’s not the heat of summer in Sydney – it’s just turning to autumn. Which is still hot compared to the UK, of course.) Johnson has recently emigrated from Nottingham. She was roughly 250th in line. And why was she there? “Queuing for her son Mark, who was at work.”
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March 25 2011, 7:43am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
I don’t hate Macs, but they do give me a syncing feeling
I love my iMac but I don’t sync.
This article titled “I don’t hate Macs, but they do give me a syncing feeling” was written by Charlie Brooker, for The Guardian on Monday 28th February 2011 00.04 UTC In 2007, I wrote a column entitled “I hate Macs”. I call it a column. It was actually an unbroken 900-word anti-Apple screed. Macs, I claimed, were “glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy-cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work.” In 2009, I complained again: “The better-designed and more ubiquitous they become, the more I dislike them . . . I don’t care if every Mac product comes with a magic button on the side that makes it piddle gold coins and resurrect the dead. I’m not buying one, so shut up and go home.” The lady doth protest too much. A few weeks later, I buckled and bought an iPhone. And you know what? It felt good. Within minutes of switching it on, sliding those dinky little icons around the screen, I was hooked. This was my gateway drug. Before long I was also toting an iPad. And after that, a Macbook. All the stuff people said about how Macs were just better, about them being a joy to use . . . it was true, all of it. They make you feel good, Apple products. The little touches: the rounded corners, the strokeable screens, the satisfying clunk as you fold the Macbook shut – it’s serene. Untroubled. Like being on Valium. Until, that is, you try to do something Apple doesn’t want you to do. At which point you realise your shiny chum isn’t on your side. It doesn’t even understand sides. Only Apple: always Apple. Here’s a familiar, mundane scenario: you’ve got an iPhone with loads of music on it. And you’ve got a laptop with a new album on it. You want to put the new album on your phone. But you can’t hook them up and simply drag-and-drop the files like you could with, ooh, almost any other device. Instead, Apple insists you go through iTunes. Microsoft gets a lot of stick for producing clunky software. But even during the dark days of the animated paperclip, or the infuriating “.docx” Word extension, they never shat out anything as abominable as iTunes – a hideous binary turd that transforms the sparkling world of music and entertainment into a stark, unintuitive spreadsheet. Plug your old Apple iPhone into your new Apple Macbook for the first time, and because the two machines haven’t been formally introduced, iTunes will babble about “syncing” one with the other. It claims it simply MUST delete everything from the old phone before putting any new stuff on it. Why? It won’t tell you. It’ll just cheerfully ask if you want to proceed, like an upbeat robot butler that can’t understand why you’re crying. No one uses terms like “sync” in real life. Not even C3PO. If I sync my DVD collection with yours, will I end up with one, two, or no copies of Santa Claus the Movie? It’s like trying to work out the consequences of time travel, but less fun, and with absolutely no chance of being adapted into a successful screenplay. Apple’s “sync” bullshit is a deception, which pretends to be making your life easier, when it’s actually all about wresting control from you. If you could freely transfer any file you wanted onto your gadget, Apple might conceivably lose out on a few molecules of gold. So rather than risk that, they’ll choose – every single time – to restrict your options, without so much as blinking. Sure, you can get around the irritating sync-issue, but doing so requires a degree of faff and brainwork, like solving the famous logic problem about ferrying a load of foxes and chickens across a river without it all ending in feathers and death. And even if you find it easy, it’s a problem Apple don’t want you to solve. They want you to give up and go back to dumbly stroking that shiny screen, pausing intermittently to wipe the drool from your chin. Apple continually attempts to scrape even more money from anything that might conceivably pass through iTunes’ tight, leathery anus. Take ebooks. Apple’s own iBook reader app may be nauseatingly pretty, but it’s not a patch on Amazon’s Kindle, which, far from being just a standalone machine, is a surprisingly nifty cross-platform “cloud” system that lets you read books on a variety of devices, including the iPhone and iPad. It even remembers what page you were on, regardless of whichever machine you were reading it on last. (It does that by “syncing” – but we’ll forgive it that, because a) it happens seamlessly and b) you never, ever lose any of your purchases.) Now Apple, typically, are no longer content to let people read Kindle books on their iPhones and iPads without muscling in on some of that money themselves. So they’ve changed their rules, in a bid to force Amazon (and anyone else) to provide in-app purchases for their products. What this dull sentence means in practice is that Apple want a 30% cut each time a Kindle user buys a book from within the iPhone Kindle app. So 30% less for authors and publishers, and 30% more for the world’s second-largest company. And that’s assuming they’ll let any old book pass through the App store: given their track record, chances are they’ll refuse to process anything they consider objectionable. Still, if they start banning books, never mind. Winnie the Pooh looks great on the iPad. Every Apple commercial makes a huge play of how user-friendly their devices are. But it’s a superficial friendship. To Apple, you’re nothing. They won’t even give you a power lead long enough to use your phone while it’s on charge, so if it rings you have to crawl around on your hands and knees, like a dog. So I no longer hate Apple products. In fact I use them every day. But I never feel like I own them. More like I’m renting them from Skynet.
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Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogI don’t hate Macs, but they do give me a syncing feeling
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February 27 2011, 6:38pm | Comments »
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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.
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February 27 2011, 8:05am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Apple’s slice makes the iPad a bad deal for newspapers
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/02/20/apples-slice-makes-the-ipad-a-bad-deal-for-newspapers
Well you’d think they’d be glad of 70% of something rather than 100% of nothing? This article titled “Apple’s slice makes the iPad a bad deal for newspapers” was written by Peter Preston, for The Observer on Sunday 20th February 2011 00.05 UTC It’s a straightforward transaction. You produce your newspaper priced at £1. Distributing and selling it – via wholesalers and retailers – takes maybe 33p of that. There’s only 67p a time left to pay for the newsprint and ink you need, plus staff wages, heat, light and the usual stuff. And there’s one added burden. Unless readers are signed up to buy their copies by subscription, you don’t know who they are. You can’t sell holidays or books to them. You can’t market lists of true believers. Conventional news-vending is fatally blind. Now see a digital nirvana on the horizon. Here’s Apple selling 40m iPads this year. Put your paper on an app at an iTunes store and you can hope, gradually, to leave all the problems of print behind. Except that, as of last week, Apple has imposed a new regime for selling from its tuneful store: it wants 30% of everything. Worse, it will only allow subscribers to sign on for marketing purposes – and most, inevitably, won’t. Compared with print, then, distributing and selling your iPad version of a £1 paper will cost only 3p or so less a copy – and you still won’t know the names of those who are buying and reading you. Only Apple will be able to pluck fruit from that particular tree. Good dead, bad deal? Lousy deal on first sight. Whereupon Google promptly launched its own One Pass pricing system for publishers – taking only 10p in the pound and leaving papers and magazines in control of readership lists. A pretty effective response, you’d think: a riposte to make Apple crumble. There’s certainly bargaining leverage here – but don’t get carried away. Some papers, like the Mail, have signed up for possible One Pass use already. But nobody will be able to put together comprehensive, overall figures for advertisers citing a single incontrovertible system while the iPad keeps user dominance over competitors such as Google’s Android system, with its different apps. It’s Godzilla versus King Kong in cyberspace. The sum of all fears – Apple moving from a 30% to 50% cut, for instance – is stark. But rather less terrifying versions don’t exactly bring much cheer, either. You need to produce print papers, website and smartphone versions, an iPad app and an Android app. All work, cost and cash. You need to market your paper in an online environment where hundreds of news sources are struggling for a foothold: more big bucks. And what have you got when you add up the figures at the end of a long, sweaty day? Not profits restored by the wonders of hi-tech. Just another puddle of red ink.
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February 20 2011, 9:31am | Comments »
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