About 18 months ago, I came across Lalit Pant, the brain behind the Kojo desktop learning environment, working as a volunteer math teacher at the Himiyota School in India. Lalit, like myself, is a programmer and I discovered we have similar goals: making computer-programming fun, simple and easy to learn. What I really enjoy is that Lalit has committed his time to doing this for children.
Lalit spent the first six years of his career as a software engineer in India, most of them at TCS
With all the hussle and tussle over the iOS5 and iPhone 4S announcements earlier this week, we thought we would take our own unscientific and idiosyncratic poll of our RWW staffers and see whether they would be ready to plunk down their own hard cash money (we have to pay for own phones here, don't you know?) and upgrade. The answer was a resounding No. Now granted, many of us have the regular 4 models, so an upgrade to a 4S isn't as compelling. But read on for yourself what everyone has to say.
Apple finally introduced the availability of the voice-command personal assistant app it paid $200m for today, called Siri. The military spin-off technology was both widely loved and often panned when it was available independently; it was either lovable Skynet or a fish on a bicycle, depending on who you ask. I tended towards thinking it the latter, myself.
Just as Augmented Reality "Heads Up Displays" have gained traction slowly in part because people feel like dorks looking at strangers around them through their camera phones, so too do many iPhone owners trained not to talk on their AT&T crippled mobile devices seem unlikely to take up the regular practice of talking to their phone. The first killer input interface that Apple really shook things up with was multi-touch screens. The next ought to continue in that direction, not away from it. It should have been Swype for iOS announced today, not Siri.
Dropbox, the online file sync and sharing service, was recently named 5th in a list of the The World's Most Valuable Startups by Business Insider. To put that in context, the only 4 companies ranked above Dropbox were (in order of valuation): Facebook, Zynga, Groupon and Twitter. Dropbox was listed above the likes of Wikipedia, Craigslist, Hulu and Tumblr. Business Insider estimated the value of Dropbox at $4 billion, based on its latest funding round at the end of August.
But let's face it, this valuation of Dropbox cannot be relied on. That $4 billion is mostly derived from fat cat VCs competing for a hot deal. It's far more important to ask: who is using Dropbox currently and is there anything in the use cases that justifies such a high valuation? So I asked the tech-savvy RWW community just that.
As Netflix begins the process of spinning out its streaming business from its traditional DVD rentals, I wanted to examine the alternative streaming services that are currently available. I looked at Amazon Prime, Hulu Plus, Vudu.com and Justin.tv. Added to this mix is what is available on Comcast's Xfinity service to just show what can be found from a typical cable TV company. (Of course, if you don't live in a Comcast service area, you can't subscribe to their streaming service online.) I choose five random movies and five TV series to see what was available on each service.
The term "Web 2.0" isn't often used these days, but it signifies the era of the Web in which social, read/write technologies came to the fore. Google was the golden child in Web 2.0, whereas Facebook is the equivalent today in the 'Social Media' era. Regardless of the terminology, the leading Internet companies of today are more competitive with each other than ever before. Whether it's Google+ vs. Facebook in social networking, Microsoft vs. Google in search, Yahoo! vs. itself in just about everything else, it's good to step back and take a higher level view of the current Web era.
That's what the Web 2.0 Map aims to do. It's updated annually by the organizers of the Web 2.0 Summit, one of the leading tech events on the calendar. New in this year's map is The Data Layer, which represents the major Internet companies as "cities of data."
The last two months in the tech world have been abnormal to say the least. Steve Jobs resigned, Google bought Motorola, Microsoft showed off Windows 8 and now uses ARM, Google now uses Intel, the AT&T and T-Mobile merger is on the brink of falling apart, HP stopped making mobile products after spending over $1 billion dollars last year to start making mobile products, and Microsoft took a page out of 2013 in the Apple product roadmap, announcing an OS that works on desktops and tablets.
Out of all these stories, Windows 8 may indirectly have the most impact over the next five years.
Talk of an Apple TV has stirred again lately with financial analyst Gene Munster predicting Apple will release in the 2012-2013 timeframe.
Many arguing against an Apple TV point to the significant margins they have commanded in the industries they traditionally operate, and that these margins would not be attainable without Apple charging a significant premium over cheaper sets. The TV industry has been in a race to the bottom on price, or so the argument goes.
BitDefender announced its Twitter malware protection service Safego is now an open beta and users can sign up here for the free service. It is similar to the service that they have had for Facebook that we last wrote about here. Once you authorize it to use your Twitter account, it begins to process all your tweets, DMs and embedded links to see what is going on.
What do you get when you collect and categorize the reading interests and intentions of millions of people exploring around the web? Fans of social bookmarking service Delicious have always believed you get a big win-win: bookmarkers are able to access links of interest them later, from any computer, and the rest of us get to watch from the outside and discover interesting new links in the wake of all that saving.
Delicious didn't really work out that well in the long run, though, and, five years after it was acquired, then neglected, by Yahoo, it was bought this spring by a team led by Youtube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Jenna Wortham of the New York Times caught up with the new company this weekend and reported on some of the thinking behind the forthcoming rebirth of Delicious. What it needs, I believe, is to be easier to use, more relevant and more attractive in design.
