Yearly Archives: 2012

Marissa Mayer jumps from Google VP to Yahoo CEO

Marissa Mayer, Google’s first female engineer and one of its highest-profile executives, has been tapped by Yahoo for its CEO spot, vacant since Scott Thompson resigned in May.

Jon Lord, Deep Purple founder, dead at 71

Lord, who co-wrote many of the group’s legendary songs including Smoke On The Water, had been receiving treatment for pancreatic cancer since last August.He co-founded Deep Purple in 1968 and also played with bands including Whitesnake during his career.

Good answer

Well, the kid didn’t pass the test, but he got an A+ for creativity.

Muxi: A professional social network

Composed of 40 fraternities, Muxi offers its users a platform where they can share their experience, ask questions, find colleagues and more generally connect with people doing the same job.

Not the first professional social network, but they seem to be incorporating some of the things that have worked in other networks. It’ll be interesting to watch.

30+ iPhone, iPad apps for the London Olympics

The Olympic Games begin in London, England on July 27 and run through August 12, 2012. I’ve put together a list of apps to help you with travel, organization, photos and sightseeing, so you can get the most out of the games this year. […]

How the Retina MacBook Pro got its EPEAT Gold rating

“It’s important to understand that the manufacturers grade themselves against the EPEAT criteria first, and then EPEAT conducts a review of this grading. That EPEAT review has not yet occurred. They can require the manufacturers to remove any product from the registry if it is not found to conform to the IEEE standard.”

Okay, so Apple gave itself a gold rating. If the Retina MacBook Pro didn’t pass muster before, it certainly can’t pass now — nothing changed. If the gold rating sticks then we call bullshit. Maybe Apple saw the advantages of having the remainder of its product line on EPEAT even if the Retina models don’t make it. Seems odd though if you think that Retina is the future of the product.

iPhone disruption

The iPhone is now also the primary device for listening to music as 85 percent claim and as for alarm clocks, 57 percent say they no longer use one, other than alarm clock apps on their iPhone.

I never really thought about it like that. I use my iPhone for an alarm clock, GPS, phone, and sometimes even a mini computer. Soon maybe even a wallet.

Amplified 15: Grab a Hoagie

Dan and Jim talk about Apple’s departure and quick return to EPEAT certification, the Tweetbot for Mac alpha release, Android vs. iOS market share, business models for blogs, and much more!

Sponsored by Freshbooks, Hover (use coupon DANSENTME for 10% off), and Squarespace (use coupon DANSENTME7 for 10% off).

EPEAT gives Retina MacBook Pro a Gold rating

The sudden pullout — and subsequent return — of Apple from the EPEAT certification program it helped create increasingly appears to have been a dispute over the status that have been given to the Retina MacBook Pro if it were submitted, as the two 15-models with the high-resolution display may have been threatened with a lower-than-top ranking, a first for the company. The Retina models now appear on the EPEAT website with Gold rankings.

How is that possible?

RIM hit with $147.2 million verdict

A northern California jury directed Research in Motion Ltd to pay $147.2 million in patent litigation over a remote management system for wireless devices, according to an attorney for the plaintiff, Mformation Technologies Inc.

Just what they needed.

RIM bleeding developers

Disillusioned with repeated delays to RIM’s next-generation BlackBerry 10 operating system and the company’s ebbing smartphone market share in the U.S., some are throwing up their hands and turning away from the platform.

That could be the final nail.

A letter from Bob Mansfield of Apple

Apple:

We’ve recently heard from many loyal Apple customers who were disappointed to learn that we had removed our products from the EPEAT rating system. I recognize that this was a mistake. Starting today, all eligible Apple products are back on EPEAT.

A rare mea culpa from Apple.

Meshin Recall

Time to be a meeting rockstar! Meshin Recall’s calendar for Evernote helps you prepare, organize and succeed!

Meshin Recall unifies all your calendars in one place. You can easily create or link Evernote entries (text, audio or photos) with specific meetings, share notes with fellow meeting attendees and use tags to categorize and search your entries.

Meshin Recall is available for both iOS and Android. Stay tuned for more exciting apps from Meshin, a PARC company.

Betaworks buys Digg for $500K

Digg, the once-powerful social news site, was sold today for $500K – a pittance compared to some other recent social network transactions.

The Apple tax

The Apple tax, as it is commonly called, is the belief that Macs cost more than PCs. I won’t ruin it for you, but Harry Marks nailed it.

Pixelmator 2.1 to add Retina support

Pixelmator 2.1 Cherry is already fully Retina-ready, including all of the user interface elements as well as the image editing engine itself. And, what can I say—Pixelmator on the new MacBook Pro with Retina display (we’ve got a few of those around the office) looks totally incredible.

Love Pixelmator. Check out the video too.

BlackBerry tweet backfires on RIM

Salvador Rodriguez for the LA Times:

The company tweeted from its @BlackBerry account “Fill in the blank: BlackBerry helps me ________.” However, many of the people who responded didn’t find BlackBerry too helpful.“Realize how thankful I am for my #iPhone,” said one user, in one of the tamest yet worst responses RIM could have received. Not to be outdone, though, another user said the same about Android.

It’s not surprising that nobody at RIM saw this coming.

How Apple’s iCloud data center got built

Apple’s new $1 billion data center — one of the highest-profile new data centers in the world — has put the town of Maiden, North Carolina (population: just over 3,000) on the tech map. But it almost didn’t get built.

Maiden took a chance and it worked.

Americans don’t trust TV news

Americans’ confidence in television news is at a new low by one percentage point, with 21% of adults expressing a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in it. This marks a decline from 27% last year and from 46% when Gallup started tracking confidence in television news in 1993.

Can’t say I blame them.