John Robinson, at his storminthecastle blog, posted a 'cloud' version (i.e. a webpage :P) of a toy app I did 5 years ago. His version is pretty cool, all the more so because it runs in the browser, using WebGL.
Two things strike me about this (other than general fun/goodness):
5 years(-ish) feels about right on the Moore's law curve, and is probably the target for 'native' smartphones apps making the transition to browser based (if the W3C can get its act together)
On the other hand, "runs like native" still seems like the highest compliment one can pay a browser based thing... so there's that.
Much has been written about the Amazon Kindle Fire (Amazon's new Android based touchscreen Kindle e-reader/media player).
Is it a game changer? Maybe. We'll see.
I've certainly ordered one, and though many say its no threat to the iPad, given its media capabilities... I dunno --- people might be surprised. If its reasonably performant (and compatible) for browsing, and given its e-commerce, e-book, and media capabilities... well, we'll see.
Certainly its going to make it tough for other Android tablet vendors; Jeff Bezos is right in asserting that devices alone don't sell (and this is old news) -- it's devices+services, as Apple has amply demonstrated again and again.
All that said, there's another interesting thing about the Kindle Fire that distinguishes its market approach from Apple's.
It's about content.
Apple sells activities -- a lifestyle; Amazon sells content.
Contrast Amazon's pitch with Apple's:
Disagree if you want, but its a philosophy difference that extends to the VERY FIRST SCREEN: Amazon hilights the content, not the application(s) -- go watch the Amazon video at the top of the post again.
Sure, you can by music, movies, and books with your iOS device, and there's no question that's a big part of the appeal -- but Apple's metaphor is about the task (books-->'Winnie the Pooh', videos-->'Inception'), and Amazon's is the reverse.
Interesting.
And here I thought "document-centric" computing, and the desktop metaphor it implies, was dead (I even wrote a eulogy).
Is it going to work? Maybe. We'll see.
But, either way, I have to give props to Amazon, and Bezos, for, well, trying to Think Different... :P
Interesting to watch "tweetalanches" happen... and where/when they get started. For example, today at 10am, "#ihatewhengirlssay" was not a hashtag with any tweets. At the moment .... a few hundred. It should be interesting to see how much "damage" it causes before the dust settles. The whole things reminds of Scott Adams' "Avatar" concept/character in his most excellent books: God's Debris and Religion War (no relation to James Cameron's upcoming movie).
The root of the announcement is, of course, that premium programming content will be available online, at no incremental cost to consumers (what marketers like to call "free" :)).
Hard to see why this is a bad thing - but there are lots of big words, like "anti-competitive" and "anti-consumer", being bandied about, so let's try to deconstruct the questions being asked a bit. Note that opinions expressed here, as always, are strictly my own.
1) Should content producers allowed to charge for access to their content?
I think the answer to that is "yes". There are some fair questions about who they charge, and how, and is there pricing collusion, etc. - but I don't think anyone means to imply that advertising is the ONLY model that content producers should be able to use?
So... broadcasters (NBC, ABC, Fox, et al) ALREADY make the content available for free (over-the-air) - and they monetize with advertising. The "Hulu model" was to take the same business model, and make it available online. I don't mean to parse semantics here, but... kinda sounds like the same idea here: make content available wherever consumers are, using a model that is already working for consumers. Like Hulu, this isn't a new business - its a new distribution channel.
Hmm - not sure I follow this one. "TV Everywhere" is not exclusive in any way - its simply a way for premium TV producers to get their content to consumers online, and helps identify those who are already paying for the content offline. If the content producers want to make their stuff free - well, it is their content; they're welcome to do so - not sure how this initiative impedes that idea. Yes, NBC, Fox, et al, already make their content available free to consumers (for a limited time window) - but also did so before Hulu.
The Internet is an "all bits are equal" data pipe into the home - and nothing about offering subscription video over the Internet with "TV Everywhere" changes that?
There is a fair question here - will the price to consumers of content trend towards zero? And if it does, how will that impact quality (i.e. who's going to want to pay to make the good stuff)?
This program doesn't purport to answer that - mostly its just trying to get more people more convenient access to something they're already paying for.
Microsoft launched their new search engine (Bing) today. Its nice, though, as a friend on Twitter pointed out, it does have that "Microsoft smell".
For instance, Googlewhack has always been a fun past time (find a search term of two words or less, that resolves to one and only one result) - and its fairly tricky to do (check out the site for details) - on Google.
But with Bing.... not so hard! Turns out that searching for a competitve search engine (Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc). is a googlewhack, um, bingwhack.
I'm (pretty) sure that the algorithm is NOT based on that fact - but that it appears so is, well, so Microsoft smelling... try it yourself.
So, the claim that IE is faster than Firefox, Safari, or Chrome, is ridiculous at many levels (MS claims IE faster than other browsers), and Microsoft was appropriately ridiculed for it.
Seriously, that's just stupid., and renders the index meaningless.
Why not just multiple the index scores by 10? Then you can claim Safari is 150X faster than IE7.
Without scaling the index into a range that meaningfully communicates (or at least correlates) to user experience (which things like FPS and even 3DMark did for video cards), it renders the testing both invalid and irrelevant.
