Tag: technology

Two Reasons why I like my Blackberry

My current employer gives out Blackberrys to its managers for official use. Two really cool features which make me smile each time:

  • Access to Intranet pages. Wow. I could _not_ do this in any other mobile. In the blackberry, I guess, you are part of the corporate network. When I open my browser, I can get access to every intranet page I have access. *Nice*
  • Seamless connectivity to our internal address book. Yes, Windows Phone (and maybe Android and the iPhone) can do it too. But the speed at which this guy works is just awesome sauce.

I spent a conflicting 2 minutes on whether to say ‘why I like my BB’ or ‘why I love my BB’ in the title. I guess I am not yet at the stage where I am ‘loving’ the BB yet. I guess I got used to the super-awesome touch screen typing experience (with auto-correct) in Windows Phone. I still dont have that here. I need to rely on my finger nails to press the minuscule keypad on the BB.

Facebook to buy Instagram

Facebook has concluded a deal to buy out Instagram for close to a billion dollars in cash and stock. That is a pretty big deal, considering Instagram is a fairly young company. There are some folks in the internet who are saying that Facebook is the new Google, and will swallow up any new good technology that crops up. And there are a few which say that the true reason is ‘fear’. I agree with the latter. I believe trends were beginning to show that, people were beginning to start sharing info about their lives and other things more over instagram photos than sharing updates on FB. I am sure that must have made FB jittery.

Apparently, as a first time ever, Facebook is going to let Instagram function the same way as it is, rather than integrating into FB. And that is one thing that I just do not believe. I have gone through 2 acquisitions, and seen a half a dozen in the EDA industry (where consolidation happens pretty commonly). This ‘show’ of ‘trust’ in letting the new company function as it is, does not last long. Let us see how long they remain independent. I am sure Instagram will get stuffed in the timeline somewhere, very soon.

Oracle gobbles up Taleo

Oracle buys Taleo for $1.9 billion. Wow. I have seen Taleo been used by quite a few Blue Chip companies for their resume/candidate management needs. Consolidation seems to be in-thing now. SAP just bought SuccessFactors. I see this inline with a couple of strong beliefs of mine —

  • The world is moving from ‘Generalized software frameworks’ to a ‘solution based system’. From configurable SAP based ERP systems to a tailormade (customizable) employee management system. From a generalized Oracle database hosting your jobs and resume data to a more-rounded Recruitment system.
  • The generalized software frameworks would not go away, but would become more  B2B (Business2Business). Startups would consume these to build powerful user-oriented systems
  • Innovation would be driven by novel use of these user-oriented systems and mash-ups rather than fundamental shifts in technology. The latter would exist, but would not be the news-breakers of tomorrow. They would just bring cheer to the innovators, and make them innovate more.

TC goes to Surface Garage

In which a Tech Crunch writer is invited to a Surface Garage in Microsoft HQ Seattle …

Devin Coldewey gets invited to a Garage meeting. For those not in the know, the Garage is a term that is used inside of Microsoft for groups of people who passionately develop independent software outside of working hours. This creative activity is highly encouraged by Microsoft. This particular invite was for a Surface Garage – ‘stuff’ that involved a Microsoft Surface.

Very nice article from Devin, where he gets super impressed with the cross-section of people who work on these side projects, and the amount of design details that go into writing a feature from scratch.

A snippet  –

Last was an interesting fusion of two innovative Microsoft products: the Surface and the Kinect. This is a sort of “morning briefing” app that is meant to run on your living room’s idle TV, which one can imagine may some day have a touch panel and depth sensing camera built in. Today it was an upright Surface 2.0 and a stock Kinect.

You always see people in movies set in the future talking to their computers, controlling them with a gesture, and so on. This is a small-scale attempt at something like that that people might actually use. When you’re at a distance, it displays large-granularity info like the weather, upcoming appointments, and so on. You can say “mail” and it’ll switch to email, or “calendar Wednesday” and it’ll switch to that. And when you approach, it senses your proximity with the Kinect and switches to a touchscreen mode where you can touch the news and email items and read them.

All put together by one guy, admittedly using APIs developed by hundreds, but a fun demonstration of what’s possible with the project right now.

For the full deal go [here].

Does Apple create Magic ?

Lex friedman, in his article in MacWorld, has a beautiful piece on Apple. An excerpt below:

Apple uses the word “magical” a lot these days. It’s enough to make you wonder if Steve Jobs dropped out of Hogwarts. The most magical item in Apple’s endless bag of products is probably the iPad. Even before the tablet hit the shelves, chief operating officer Tim Cook was talking up the “magic of using [the iPad]” at an investors conference. For a time, Apple’s standard boilerplate at the end of each press release described the original iPad as magical.

It’s not just tablets, though—Apple sells products like the Magic Mouse and the Magic Trackpad. With the possible exception of Mr. Clean, no other non-legerdemain-focused company so consistently depicts its products as supernaturally enhanced.

As fond as Apple may be of promoting its products using terms of enchantment, I think it misses the point—and actually sells the company’s efforts a bit short. Instead of “magical,” it’s more accurate to describe Apple’s products as brilliantly and patiently engineered, with meticulous attention to detail.

Read the full article here.

 

Can you beat Apple?

Jason Kottke has  a very compelling article on the few weaknesses of Apple. Very good observations I should say. On hind-sight, and on reading this list, they do seem like missing link. I list a summary below:

1. Apple doesn’t do social well on a large scale

2. Apple can’t do the cloud either

3. iTunes is getting long in the tooth.

4. The Apple software that rock (eg KeyNote) are the ones that Jobs uses. The ones that he does not care about (social, ical) etc are the ones that are not so good.

Read the full article here.

Segway Polo

segwaypolo

Check out this brilliant new age hi-tech sport. I think the living maharaja descendents of some of the royal kingdoms (Scindias, Wodeyars, etc …) may be interested in this. I wonder if you also need artifical turf for this.

If you want to see this in action, check out the youtube video here.

Update: On further thought, maybe the toyota winglet might be more suitable for this. Gives more handroom for playing the right shot! 🙂

Courtesy: GAS