Last week, I linked to a tweet that showed a picture of a double-wrapped MacBook power brick. This tweet (and others like it) spawned a ton of discussion, both pro and con, on wrapping your brick this way.
The linked article is Wired’s take on the issue.
The linked article talks about the impact that Jony Ive’s decision to scrub skeuomorphism from iOS has had on the Montessori experience. Very thoughtful piece.
These numbers are from a ChangeWave study done last month.
Big loss for Samsung today.
Are you kidding me? All these years and I never knew this. Genius.
Seems like this era might be coming to an end.
Speaking at an investor conference in New York City on Tuesday, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said that with smartphone penetration at over 75 percent and soon reaching 90 percent, wireless operators need to work harder to get customers to use more of the network rather than simply getting on the network.
Now Qualcomm is shipping their version of the Apple iBeacon.
Gimbal is a comprehensive context aware, proximity platform for brands to engage their customers’ mobile devices with highly relevant communications using a powerful combination of physical location, activity, time and personal interests.
Want to learn how to program? Code.org is organizing a world-wide campaign to get people started with programming. Apple Stores are offering a free one hour Introduction to Computer Science course as their part of the campaign.
This is a big milestone for the US App Store. Worldwide apps hit one million in October.
If bright and dazzling is your thing, these cases definitely bring the bling. If you need a visual cue, either as a hearing assist or an alternative to an audio alert, this might be just the thing.
This video gives a good sense of the range of Siri commands.
Very smart. A place for Siri in your home so anyone can make use of the service.
A problem that occurs in small island nations:
There are only about 320,000 people living in Iceland. A small island nation, it’s also isolated from the rest of the world, so you don’t have a lot of immigration, historically, and therefore, you don’t have a lot of genetic diversity. In some sense, the vast majority of Iceland’s population are branches from the same family tree.
Nice use of iBeacon tech.
This new ad does its best to make the case that the Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 (what an unwieldy name) is a better buy than the iPad Air.
I have to say, my expectations were mixed, with trepidation based on the ill-conceived video trailer but balanced by my anticipation of a story well told by a seasoned writer.
I have a number of close friends and family members who use hearing aids. This is a huge step forward.
Juli Clover’s take on the 3D object sensing technology Apple just acquired when they purchased PrimeSense. As much as she sees, my guess is, Apple sees much more. Object sensing technology has been around since the 1970s, when Patrick Winston first wrote about computer vision and described the artificial intelligence algorithms needed for a computer to distinguish the corners that make up a room.
PrimeSense provided the 3D object sensing technology behind the Microsoft Kinect. Wonder if Apple gets a nickel for every Xbox sold.
This article from MIT Technology Review argues that the near-simultaneous release of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One may mark the last wave of consoles, at least as we know them. Not so sure I agree with that, but the article makes some interesting points. Though this generation of consoles is clearly superior to the ones they replace, the technological leap is clearly much smaller than the previous one. In addition, the gaming market has become fragmented, with smartphone and tablet gaming grabbing a significant and, depending how you calculate things, perhaps majority slice of the pie.
Downloadable games such as Angry Birds and Minecraft, which play on mobile phones and basic PCs, now constitute a major part of the industry (in April this year, Angry Birds developer Rovio estimated that its games have been downloaded 1.7 billion times, while in 2012, Minecraft earned its independent creator, Markus Persson, more than $100 million).
There’s no question that franchises like Call of Duty are still selling big. The argument is that the value perception of each new console release is declining and the number of consoles sold is declining accordingly.
Each new iteration of hardware brings a historical downward trend in console sales. Sony’s wildly successful PlayStation 2 sold 150 million consoles. Its successor sold 80 million. It appears that Sony and Microsoft both lose a lot of money on these devices. For these reasons, some people think this new generation of console hardware (including Nintendo’s beleaguered Wii-U, which has failed to capture consumers’ imaginations) may be the last.
For consumers, the decline in consoles is not only a symptom of broader choice (in the 1990s, consoles and PCs were the only way to play complex screen games) but also one of diminishing returns. Martin Hollis, designer of the seminal Nintendo 64 movie tie-in Goldeneye 007, told me: “With each iteration, the multiple of increased power matters less. Looking back, PlayStation 2 was a huge leap from PlayStation. But PlayStation 3 was a much smaller leap. Each time we climb a curve of diminishing returns.” Hollis, like many others, believes that most people who only casually play video games will remain unconvinced by the difference between the new versions of the consoles and the previous ones.
From a gaming point of view, smartphones, tablets, cloud solutions (like Steam and Gaikai) and consoles are all converging. Just as iOS and Android emerged as the last OS standing in the great smartphone dust-up, I suspect there will be just a few players left standing once the gaming chaos resolves itself.
I love stories like this.
Seva is a not-for-profit humanitarian foundation best known for their work restoring eyesight to over 3 million blind people suffering from cataract blindness. This is the story about how Steve helped them get their start.
The $290 million verdict is nearly $100 million less than the $380 million Apple sought in the retrial, but far above the $53 million Samsung said it owed. In a series of seemingly desperate last-minute attempts to delay the verdict, Samsung first moved for a mistrial on racial grounds, and then asked Judge Koh to stay the case pending a possibly years-long reexamination of a key Apple patent.
Judge Koh denied both motions, and the new verdict brings Apple’s total award in the landmark patent dispute is $888 million.
Now just pay up scumbags.
Walk into Macys’ Herald Square or Union Square store, a ShopKick notification arrives on your phone, and the marketing campaign kicks in.
Using technology Shopkick developed itself based on capabilities Apple built into its latest mobile software, customers with iPhones and even some Android handsets can have their Shopkick app “woken” up by a signal from Bluetooth transmitters when they enter the store, even if their phone is in sleep mode. As a customer who has opted in walks through the store, they might see special offers based on the products they are near, said Cyriac Roeding, Shopkick’s CEO.
Note the phrase “technology Shopkick developed itself”. This is iBeacon technology, but not Apple-made beacons.
Roeding said his transmitters, dubbed shopBeacons, were created based on a protocol embedded in Apple’s iOS 7 mobile operating software. Apple hasn’t broadly released the most recent version of iBeacon’s technical specifications.
There is so much to discover here. How will consumers react? Over time, will the notifications be seen as a benefit or marketing noise? Will this enhance the shopping experience? The potential is certainly there.
Know anyone with vision loss? Check out the video, perhaps this might be helpful to them. Love the advances being made in this field.
Fascinating review offers insight into the design tradeoffs involved in being first to market with a new technology.
Jason Biheller, the director of gaming innovations at PowerA, admitted that some of the issues with the controller’s feel may have been due to a number of restrictions. “It wasn’t an easy project,” he said in a phone interview. “I’m not blaming this on timing, but we did have a limited amount of time to get this done, and because the phone had to sit in the middle, it was very difficult. I guess you lose a little stability by having the phone in the center of the controller, because you’ve got moving parts and some mechanical designs moving back and forth. So you lose some of that solid feel you get with the Vita.”
I see three obvious alternatives to game controller design. First is the sandwich, the approach taken by Moga and Logitech (with their PowerShell controller), with the controller built to sandwich the iOS device between the two sides of the controller. This seems to be the most efficient approach if you want to take the controller with you, but has the mechanical disadvantage of having two points of wiggle weakness or flex, where the controller connects to the iOS device.
The second alternative is the top-heavy approach used for most Android controllers, where the device is held in place on top of the controller. This approach is unwieldy but necessary, due to the large number of Android form factors.
The third approach, is the satellite design used by consoles, where the controller is a single, solid, piece and plugs into the device via a cable. The upsides are solid controller feel and compatibility with multiple form factors (iPad and iPhone, for example), while the down side is the clumsiness of play while on the move.
It’s early days and I’m sure there’ll be lots of design innovation to come.
Wow. Bad bet.
Adam Najberg shares his initial thoughts on the Xbox One. If you are planning on buying an Xbox One or have one on preorder, this is well worth a read. More importantly, I think anyone involved in the gaming space, especially on the hardware side, might take a look as well. There are lessons to be learned.
Apart from a dearth of titles — the Xbox One is launching with 23 games — my main beef with the Xbox One is that games take longer than I want to download, because of their large size and my relatively slow 30 Mbps Internet connection.
Thankfully, games let you start playing well before they’re fully downloaded, and keep downloading in the background until they’re done. And there aren’t enough games that allow you to skip over cinematic scenes. I’m hoping developers and publishers get less self-impressed and let us get to the gameplay faster as fascination with the new consoles’ capabilities diminishes.
One quibble. I get that 30 Mbps is not the fastest connection available, but I would hardly qualify it as relatively slow. Not picking on the author, just making the point that if an experience is a problem at 30 Mbps, it’s a problem for a large slice of your audience.
After laying hands on both consoles, though, I can see where Microsoft and Sony have diverging views of the future and what role your living room will play in it.
Sony has coalesced around the gaming community, trying to grab gamers in an even tighter embrace than ever before.
Microsoft is looking to breed total dependence for games, social media, communications and entertainment through one device. The hope is that gamers who cut their teeth on the Xbox 360 will still gravitate toward the Xbox One and its enhanced multiplayer gaming. Now, though, there’s a whole new, younger and more-easily-distracted generation of gamers coming online, the kids with their smartphones or iPad Minis in their lap as they play, chatting, listening to music or watching a video. With Xbox One, Microsoft is hoping to move their second screen onto the first screen.
It’ll be interesting to watch all this play out. To me, this Microsoft and Sony, burning their powder trying to fine tune their console-based living room experience while Nintendo frets on the sidelines and Apple and Google plot their longer view. Such fun.
Thinking of taking advantage of Apple’s Reuse and Recycling program? You now have the option of trading in a water-damaged iPhone or iPad. If you’ve never been to the site, take a minute to dig into the options. Interesting to see the range of devices Apple will take in trade. To Apple’s credit, even if your device has no value, Apple will send you a shipping label so you can return the device to Apple and keep it out of the landfill.
Have a Windows machine? No problem. Apple will take trade-ins on some models. And for those machines Apple can’t repurpose, they’ll point you to a free recycling solution.
Would be nice to see this in a museum somewhere. The opening bid was set at €180,000 (about US$243,000), which is relatively low compared to recent bids for a working Apple I. Goes to show how tricky the classic computer market can be.