Posts by AnonymousDareDevil 20 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Mar 2010
1) NPC's in games
2) SIRI with a face - costumize your digital assistant with the face of your favourite actor/musician/polititian :-)
3) Kiosks with a friendly face - for everything from buying a soda to subscribing cable TV or searching for tourist sights
4) Automated contact centers - with the new HTML extensions, soon every browser will be able to make video calls, and the "Click to Call" or chat will have you talking to Zoe
Automated call centers with a friendly face
Thanks to VoiceOver, the screen reader that comes included for free with iOS.
Android also has some screen reader solutions, but not all are free and none are as good as VoiceOver.
So no, tapping the destination on a touchscreen isn't a problem.
This could be very useful in train stations, airports, shopping malls, etc.
PS: I'm blind and use an iPhone and an iPad every day.
If the good news is that Nokia's new phones are appealing, well designed WP7 phones that might get people to lust for WP7 phones like they lust for iPhones, then why couldn't they do the same thing with Android?
What were the advantages of going with Microsoft?
Why didn't they choose to do like Amazon, and go with their own flavour of Android?
As usual, Matt Asay writes great forum fodder.
One interesting point, however, is the possible emergence of web apps, like the FT one or the FB project.
If the mobile market continues to be as fragmented as it has been so far, with Android, IOS, WebOS, Win. Phone 7, RIM's whatever then that could be a cheaper and simpler solution than developping apps for all these platforms, while at the same time escaping the appstore police.
More and more iphone users stream their podcasts instead of downloading them.
A lot of iphone users listen to internet radio or to stream services like pandora, spotify or last.fm
A lot of ipad users (the lucky bastards who can) watch streamed videos from netflix and the sort.
So a cloud only iphone isn't that crazy.
In a Nano, however, it's strange, since if you're going for the cheaper model you'll probably won't be willing to pay for higher phone bills.
Enter the rumour about Apple becoming a virtual operator and it starts getting interesting.
First, Mr. Clarke, speak *near* the mike! I kept having to raise the volume when you spoke, and lowering it when it wasMJ!
And she has a *slightly* higher pitched voice, so it really hurt if I wasn't fast enough :-)
MJ's description of Jupiter reminded me more of ChromeOS' idea of web apps with local "caches" and interfaces than some kind of wrapper for portable apps.
If it is this, and is reasonably done, then this could really save MS.
Having Web-based enterprise apps plus Office, all working the same way in a phone, tablet, desktop or some kind of Web VDI would get many, many companies droolling.
Especially if they make it easy for all the current enterprise webapps that only run on IE 6 to migrate to this model.
Everyone knows that the future of the Web is media, especially video. Some might even say that's a future already present.
It made no sense for Google to have their future controlled by 2 of their major competitors, so pushing for another codec was simply a question of survival.
Buying Webm and releasing it as an open codec was probably one of the few ways of doing this with any chance of success.
With IE continuing to lose market share and Chrome gaining it, this is the right time to drop the codec they want to kill, before Mobile Safari becomes too relevant.
Flash plugin for video is a present that noone believes has a future, not even Adobe.
The rest is just circus to make us post on forums.
There already are several iPad cases that either include or have the space for a bluetooth keyboard.
The most obvious advantage is that you use the iPad for the screen, and can still use all the touch gestures.
Add a real battery that can also charge the tablet, speakers, ethernet and USB ports and you have a laptop that can be transformed into a tablet with no extra software, or silly screen flipping, for a very reasonable price.
The problem with using an Apache license as opposed to GPL is that a company like Microsoft could for instance sell "Windows Cloud Stack", using all the Open Stack code plus some closed code of their own to support Azure or other of their products.
While preventing anyone in the Open Stack comunity of developping an open alternative to the close code by the use of patents.
Where you read Microsoft you can also read VMWare, Oracle, Amazon... If I was an american tax payer I'd be "mighty pleased"
All this paranoia about apps in smart phones is just silly.
Does anyone choose their phone based on the number of fart apps? Or on the number or quality of RSS readers, weather apps, note taking, recipes, etc, etc?
The killer apps for smart phones are GPS, games, mail and web access. News and home banking/personal finance probably follows.
And, like it should be obvious, all the known brands for this, the TomToms andAngrybirds, are the first ones to be interested in supporting the largest number of plattforms.
The fight for the smart phone market will be about the handsets, the carriers, prices, prices, prices, and even fashion, but certainly not about developers.
Oracle is trying to strongarm its way into the mobile market, where it has no presence.
On the server side, enterprises will continue to use Java, with or without ASF, and most will feel more confident with Oracle behind Java.
On the mobile space, however, Oracle is irrelevant, while ASF/Harmony is not, especially with all the hype around Android.
If ASF/Harmony and Google/Android fork away, who will care about Oracle's Java for mobile?
The author does a great job of promoting Amazon, but never really explains why it is such a magical solution for scaling applications...
One could argue that Google has much more experience with complex applications and huge scale, like Google Docs, Maps or all the Ads stuff and the data mining associated.
One could also say that Microsoft has a long history with developers and will offer the easiest path from the desktop/web to the cloud. Just think of how many companies still use IE 6 because of "legacy" web apps.
Or one could point out how Oracle represents, for many organizations, their data and business logic, even when they don't provide all the business applications. While scalability means savings in investment, business data and processes means clients and revenue.
Or one could talk about IBM and their solid, no nonsense image.
Or VMware, Cisco, HP, etc...
One could say many things, but one should especially say why... this one thinks.
I love my iPad, but what made me pay the Ferrari price wasn't the applications available for it.
Or rather, it was but the applications were iBooks, Mail, Calendar, Safari, iPod, etc...
I really don't want a different application, each with it's own illusions of great modern design,for every newspapers/magazines/tv channel/comic book publisher I follow/subscribe.
There are some valid cases,like GPS, Office Productivity, Games, etc but it's getting to the silly side when you see application after application that is just a different interface to a web site.
How many applications do we have on average in a PC?
Google wants android to be the #1 mobile OS, Apple wants iPhone to be the Mercedes of mobiles... well, Apple wants to BE the Mercedes of consumer electronics.
In the near future, Apple may find out that Google has the largest media distribution market (that's what smartphones and tablets are for, really) or maybe Google will realize that Apple's market is where all the big spenders are.
In the mean time, we the consumers benefit from healthy competition.
In my experience, one of the biggest obstacles to a wider use of desktop Linux for businesses are the legacy applications.
People can be retrained in a different office suite/OS, and the savings in licensing plus all the recent traumatic experiences with Vista/Office ensure that isn't really a problem for most medium to large organizations.
But migrating/developping new applications to support the new Desktop OS is just incredibly expensive, if not simply impossible.
And even recent "Web" applications turn out to only run properly in IE (sometimes version 6!) or require a component installed in all the Desktops that only exists for Windows.
Microsoft has been very good at nurturing its developper comunity, while ensuring real technology lock-in.
Now that we're living the last days of the PC era, this will certainly change, but to what? And is the end of the PC more of a threat than an opportunity for Linux/Open source?
This is what I'd like to see in part 2 of the Chronicles.
a) To read about ash clouds, elections and Thai flavored democracy (general news) I'll never pay or even subscribe for free, as there are many sources, from 24H news channels and radio to web sites.
b) For in-depth articles, analysis from specialists and opinions by relevant people I would pay (isn't this why many people by the "heavy" newspapers today?)
c) To a sub-set of the above I'd probably subscribe, but I'd occasionally want to buy more newspapers/magazines.
d) I would want to have access to the old issues I'd bought. A subscription would be more appealing if it included a search feature, even better if it went beyond the issues I "owned".
e) Full "page" ads between artificial pages of an article are very annoying, and my instinct will be to ignore them and immediatly move to the next page.
F) This won't kill free news on the Web, in an extreme case it will only mean that Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc will pay news agencies like Reuters for the content. The most probable scenario is that many news organizations will continue to have a Web presence, but only with the general news/without in-depth articles
All this, however, only with a 100-200 Euros Pad/slate..
How exactly is this wrong?
Beethoven , Mozart, Da Vinci, Picasso, Miles Davis, etc were paid and in many cases very well paid, so becoming rich from your art is neither a recent thing norequal to being no good.
If something changed in the 20th century is that more and more people can support their artists of choice, instead of being a thing of the "ruling class" has it was in Mozart's time )for instance).
This is even more true now with the Internet.
That said, I refuse to lose my civil rights to save *any* industry, especially when there is a lot more that industry can do for itself, as the Beggars Group and a huge amount of other indie labels the world over show.
and when you're entering into a war with Google and Microsoft?
What would worry me, if I was an Apple shareholder, is the fact that all of Apple's killer products seem to be creations of its CEO, who doesn't come across as the type to appreciate other people's ideas.
If/When Jobs leaves, will Apple have anyone else to innovate?
History tells us no.
Opera probably wants Apple to reject their browser so that they can then turn and submit a complaint to the EU.
If the browser ballot shows a clear impact in the browser share, has it seems so far, then there may even be political support for such a complaint.
If, for fear of this, Apple does aprove the browser, then many other companies in the EU and the US could try to widen the "gap in the wall"
May you live in interesting times, Apple...
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