Let's get one thing straight: Apple's Siri is based on a DARPA-funded military artificial intelligence project. It is indicative of the AI-powered future of search. Siri is not just another voice-powered virtual assistant tool.
Allegations of Siri being pro-life circulated about the Web yesterday, kicked off by a post on Raw Story. Raw reported that if you're in Washington D.C. Siri won't direct you to the Planned Parenthood on 16th St, but it will suggest that you pay a visit to anti-abortion Crisis Pregnancy Center in Landsdowne, Virginia. Google, RawStory explained, would turn up search results for "seven metro-area abortion clinics, 2 CPCs and a nationwide abortion referral service."
This is poignant, especially considering the fact that Siri does not use Google for search results. If it did, Apple could deny responsibility for the results. But in fact, Siri goes out of its way not to use Google.
The iPad isn't even two years old yet, and already it's making a huge impact on the consumer electronics market. The tablet has sold phenomenally well, chipping away at netbook and other PC sales in the process. Android-based tablets are slowly catching up, and will undoubtedly be fueled by the Kindle Fire, but the iPad is expected to remain dominant for at least four more years.
This is all great news for Apple and the consumers who love their products. It's less thrilling for its competition, quite obviously. But it's also a bummer for companies that manufacture RAM chips.
You're already paying a monthly fee for Internet access at home and an additional fee of equal or greater size for your smartphone's data plan. When all is said and done, you end up paying nearly $2,000 a year to access the Web from two devices, but only one of those connections is mobile and ubiquitous, unless you pay extra to take your home ISP with you on the road.
With these costs, paying an additional $15 to $50 to tether your iPhone to your laptop can seem difficult to stomach. Well, now you may not have to. For whatever reason, Apple has approved an iOS app that lets you do exactly that for a one-time fee of $15.
The developers behind minimalist writing app iA Writer have rolled out its latest update, which adds iCloud integration to sync documents between the iPad and Mac OS X. This is the first time iCloud has been baked into an application released by somebody other Apple, according to iA Writer founder Oliver Reichenstein. Update: iA Writer is just the latest third party app to get iCloud integration, but it is not the first, as previously reported.
iA Writer is a popular desktop and iOS app for writers that is designed to maximize focus on long-form writing. It does this mostly through a minimalist design and enabling a full-screen mode to eliminate distractions on the desktop. It's one of several distraction-free writing apps of this nature.
Apple products, cash and clothes are what American teenagers really want for Christmas, according to new data from Piper Jaffray. Over the past four years, Apple products have become increasingly popular. Jaffray's firm has tracked teen trends for the past 11 years. Data from fall 2011 shows that 3.4% want an iPhone for Christmas, 25% desire an iPad, 2.1% want an iPod of some kind and 1.3% just want the iPod Touch. About 11% of teens surveyed mentioned wanting some form of Apple product. In 2008, that number was only 7%.
The catalog industry is a thriving business that all the big names in retail spend large sums of money on. Partly because my mother was once a lead copywriter for a prominent catalog, the holiday season has always been dominated by large stacks of retailers' reading material. With the digital era, those stacks of catalogs have disappeared but Google is making a concerted effort to aggregate all the prominent catalogs in one place for Android tablets and the iPad.
Google has released this year's version of Google Catalogs as an app for both iOS and Android. As we have seen over the Thanksgiving weekend, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, mobile commerce is exploding. Through partnerships with Google and others, large retailers are making sure they are not left in the dust.
The mobile platform wars are in full swing. Android and Apple dominate the landscape but a new report from VisionMobile says that there will be no clear winner in the battle for supremacy over the mobile market. Android controls the numbers, Apple controls the profits and everybody else is fighting for scraps and third place in the ecosystem.
Developers are the front line soldiers of the platform wars. "iOS and Android are winning not only by virtue of technological sophistication, but primarily by the strength of their application ecosystems," the VisionMobile report states. The "network effect" drives the ecosystem, more sales equals more developers and more applications which in turn drives more developers. We take a close look at the platform wars through VisionMobile's report below.
In all the rumor-crazed lead-up to the launch of the iPhone 4S, one feature that was speculated about but never that likely was the inclusion of near field communications. Next year, when the iPhone 5 is actually, finally released, there's a very good chance it will have NFC, according to a report from DigiTimes.
Citing sources at Taiwan-based smartphone manufacturers, DigiTimes says Apple's new iPhone will be one of several devices to ship with NFC in 2012, although we expect the sometimes faulty iPhone rumor mill to churn on until the device is unveiled next year.
Advertising and data analysis firm Millennial Media issued its monthly mobile trends report this morning for October. It showed that the iPhone was the most used single device for the month with nearly 13% of all use across its network. While Android might dominate the ecosystem, the iPhone as a singular device is the most used smartphone on the market.
There is an epic battle taking place before our eyes, in our pockets and in our wallets. Smarthones have come to dominate consumer behavior and the headlines of media. What is the newest development with the iPhone? What are the newest and hottest Android devices this week? Can Microsoft make a dent in the mobile market? What kind of tricks does Amazon have up its sleeves? Does Facebook have a plan to tap into consumers' wallets through mobile devices?
Make no mistake, the pipeline between users' bank accounts through smart devices is what each one of these companies is looking to tap. Each one of these five major American technology companies is taking a different route to this one goal. Yet, each one of these companies is taking a different route to the same goal. Let's break down the roads that each one of these companies is taking in the quest to win the Mobile Platform Game of Thrones.
