Amazon’s Sense of Humor
When it’s not busy putting brick and mortar stores out of business, Amazon does exercise a pretty good sense of humor. Continue reading Amazon’s Sense of Humor
Category: Tech
Just One Word: Plastics
If The Graduate is any indication, there’s a great future in plastics, and Apple seems to think so, too. In its ad for the new iPhone 5C, “Plastic Perfected,” Apple seeks to emphasize the new phone’s “unapologetic” plasticity. Continue reading “Just One Word: Plastics”
Microkia
Microsoft is acquiring the phone part of Nokia for a cool $7.2 Billion. Nokia CEO Stephen Elop is staying on board, which, I think will fuel rumors that he was a corporate trojan horse – leaving Microsoft for Nokia, only to oversee the latter’s sale to his former employer – and that he is in the running to fill Ballmer’s shoes. To that end, if will be very interesting to see if, in fact, Elop does get the promotion, because it would be indicative of Microsoft’s pivot from a PC and Office-based company to a mobile-oriented one. Continue reading “Microkia”
The Bondcast!
Here’s our first episode of the Bondcast, where, true to our mission, we “make self-aggrandizing statements on things that we’re wholly unqualified to make statements about.” A brief breakdown of the ‘cast goes as follows:
Strategic Alternatives
Blackberry’s chairman announced that the former smartphone heavyweight will begin exploring “strategic alternatives” to address its dwindling market share and placate unhappy shareholders. As I’ve said before, it ultimately makes sense for Blackberry to ditch its OS team, adopt Android, and just concentrate on two businesses: hardware and enterprise services like encrypted email and messaging. It seems logical for a few reasons: Continue reading “Strategic Alternatives”
From the Wall Street Journal, on Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the Washington Post: At Amazon, Mr. Bezos has instilled a culture of extreme focus on customer service and low prices. Amazon executives fly coach class, and some desks at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters are fashioned out of repurposed doors to remind employees to be frugal. Those … Continue reading
The Runoff from Streaming
John Paul Titlow has a neat piece on Fast Company about the conundrum Spotify faces with streaming. It’s hard for the service to afford its hefty payouts to traditional record labels while adequately compensating the up-and-coming artists or indie bands who – ideally, at least – use Spotify to gain exposure. Titlow suggests a potential route:
There’s an App for That
IFTTT just released an iOS app, which brings all the great features of the website to iPhones and iPads everywhere. One “recipe” that the blog post mentions is the ability to automatically upload pictures from your iPhone to Dropbox or Google Drive. Pretty cool, huh?
Only thing is, many Android phones have had the feature for years, and in fact, I take it for granted that when I snap a picture on my EVO, it pops up in my Dropbox ten seconds later.
A Metaphor, Not a Skeumorph
From the always-proper Economist: The iPhone’s notification panel, with its imitation linen effect, was not descended from an object that was once made of linen. The switch that, say, allows you to switch an iPhone into Airplane Mode is not an on-screen replacement for what used to be a physical switch. In the early days of … Continue reading A Metaphor, Not a Skeumorph
Fifteen Seconds
Facebook has decided to shorten Warhol’s “Fifteen Minutes of Fame” to “Fifteen Seconds,” thanks to the new video functionality added to Instagram, which allows the user to take up to fifteen seconds of video – a full nine seconds longer than Twitter’s Vine app, and certainly one giant leap for mankind. That said, we would … Continue reading Fifteen Seconds
Silicon Spatula 