News, analysis and context on enterprise technology for the CTO
Recently, Apple announced their purchase of Israeli flash memory producer, Anobit. The proposed purchase would be $500M (just a drop in the bucket of their $81B cash reserves). However, this purchase has long-reaching implications on not only their mobile/tablet portfolio, but also their computing capabilities. Mobile/Tablet Implications Apple has long insisted that removeable media was unnecessary, and have kept it out of their products. However, … [Read more...]
Check out this blog post over on GIGAOM (here). The topic, Nick D'Aloisio, has created Summly, an iPhone app, which does this; "Summari[z]es content into a digestible format that can be easily consumed to allow for a relevant and productive web browsing experience." Unlike Google Currents (post here), which re-formats news feeds and sites into better organized and easily readable content, Summly uses "ontological detection and machine learning … [Read more...]
I recently wrote an article examining the basic offerings of Apple, Google, and Amazon, and hypothesized that they were all building ecosystems to get consumers locked in to one ecosystem or another. Here is another post in that series, this time looking at the Apple ecosystem. Apple's Offerings Apple has some of the most innovative and sought after consumer products on the market right now. You likely don't know many people that don't own or … [Read more...]
You might have missed it last week, but Google released one of the best designed apps I have ever seen. It was their news consumption app - Google Currents. Google released it for both Android and iOS. There are smartphone and tablet versions for Android, and the iPhone app seems to be the exact same as the Android smartphone version. The app allows you to subscribe to a host of different periodicals, all which are displayed in a clear and easy to … [Read more...]
On a whim, I recently picked up a Roku XD player from Woot.com. The Roku allows you to tap into a lot of the video going around on the "interwebs" and watch it on your HDTV of choice. The Roku is one of the devices that so-called "cord-cutters" use to keep themselves entertained. After a few weeks with it (coupled with subscriptions to Amazon Prime and Netflix Instant Video) I've got a few thoughts on it. Streaming Video and the Roku - Is it all it's … [Read more...]
Yesterday, I read a great article over at GigaOM about how the Kindle Fire has become "The Next Big Haven for Developers." (Check it out here). Apparently, Amazon's Appstore (with 1-click purchasing) as well as the number of Kindle Fire devices sold (said to be over 5M), have made the Kindle Fire the targeted device of choice for Android development. I think this is great news, long has the 7" form factor been ignored, and Android been the "ugly sister" … [Read more...]
Android is a great mobile computing platform. It’s extensible, fairly easy-to-use (considering its plethora of features), has a great application store with hundreds of thousands of applications, and connects back with everything in Google so that all of Google’s information and services are at the users fingertip. For developers, it’s a very extendable platform which is able to integrate code from a variety of languages, run C programs, and deploy … [Read more...]
Android has been plagued by malware, security vulnerabilities, and now, privacy issues. It started with HTC's logging application which over-zealously logged aspects of phone use in insecure ways which made that data accessible by any application, and more recently has come to a head with the discovery of the carrier IQ application. The Carrier IQ application is supposedly a diagnostic tool which sits on a variety of phones including Android, iPhone, … [Read more...]
Last week, Adobe announced that they were dropping development for Flash for mobile devices and TV. According to Adobe: "Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming … [Read more...]
The Kindle Fire (shipping yesterday, with over 1M pre-orders) has been indicted as a device that will further fracture the Android Ecosystem. It has an Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) soul, but is completely skinned over in all Amazon garb. The dual-core, 7" tablet has quite a few capabilities that stand out, but it is clear that the intent is to boost user buy-in into the Amazon ecosystem. Amazon now offers streaming video, book rentals, music … [Read more...]