Monday, November 29, 2010

Kinect 4th generation input device

The German company Telefunken did sell as the first company their computers with a mouse in 1970. Xerox offered a mouse with their computers in 1981. But the mouse got never mainstream till Apple sold their Macintosh with mouse. A lot of people are believing that Apple did invent the mouse, but the reality is that they made the mouse famous. Three years ago Apple introduced their first phone (iPhone 2G) with touch screen. Many people think Apple invented the touch screen smart phone but i can remember that i had in 2002 a handspring Treo 180g which was a touch screen smart phone (handheld with phone) based on the palm OS.




Apple had in 1983 a touch phone, but it was everything than a smart phone (if the story is true)




However Apple did do a good marketing and we have to admit that the iPhone is a beautiful device with a great OS and usability, even if their OS does look very similar to old Palm OS screen ( image palm tungsten)





Later on, Apple did revolutionize the mobile devices by inventing a new type of mobile device: The iPad. Bigger and lighter than netbooks, smarter than ebook readers and better to work with than phones.
But again it was not really new. Many years PC manufactures did try to sell touch devices like the iPad, the only mistake they did that they tried to have a full keyboard and a full PC OS with it. Apple was just arrogant enough to leave the keyboard out and to offer the iPad with a mobile OS instead of a full MacOsX.

We know that Apple is arrogant, but this is good. Without Apple, we might still have a floppy drive or still have CD drives (I forgot most of us have still CD or DVD drive, but not anymore longer). Apple stops to put these devices into their hardware and other will follow, because leaving a device out saves money to produce. No keyboard on phone makes a phone cheaper and less hardware problems to deal with.

Apple did a lot this decade, but the biggest yet invention comes from Microsoft. They invented the real new pointing device: The kinect.
The kinect is a device without being a device :). You install the kinect on your xbox and it will scan you and the room and uses your movements as device.
It can recognize multiple people and it is just awesome and fun to play games without holding any device. It is the Wii on steroids.

We heard how well the iPhone and how fast the iPad are selling, but the kinect as cool it is, it is selling even better (sure one reason is, it is much cheaper than the iPad)

The iPad was crowned the fastest-adopted consumer electronic device ever last month, stealing the title from the once-coveted DVD player. Records are made to be broken, though, and the Microsoft Kinect has already come out of the gate twice as fast.

25 days after its launch, Microsoft said today that it has sold 2.5 million motion-detecting Kinect devices. Granted, that includes sales over the Black Friday shopping holiday, but reviews of the device have been positive. Apple took twice as long to sell its 2 millionth iPad. These seem to be the days of the radically new interface.

And the kinect is a radical interface, hackers are working on cool things like connecting the kinect to your PC. No mouse or keyboard needed to type or point. Just using your fingers in the air.

I see the kinect just as the beginning for device less pointing and input device in the household. You want to switch the TV channel, just swipe your hand in the air from left to right.

You want to change the timer of your microwave while being in the living room. Just point your finger to your hand watch and move the finger from 3 to 6 to extend the timer by 15 minutes.

In the mood to play drums? Just get your sticks, sit on a chair and start playing air drums and your speakers will produce Dolby surround drum sounds.

The limit is the sky.

Hurra to Microsoft.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Facebook best way for social advertisement

The daughter of a friend of mine is participating in a model contest. The winner of the contest flies to NY for a photo shooting. The winner is the person with the most votes during a specific time period. You can only vote once a day for one person in the contest.
His daughter is pretty but with over 1309 participants it would be hard for her to win or to come into the top 10, especially that there are some professional models in the contest.

Her father took a great approach which did so far bring her to the top 10.



But how did he do it?

He used his Facebook account. He has over 2,200 friends in Facebook and posted every day on his wall that his daughter is in a model contest with the link directly to her model card. He is as well asking in his posts that all friends shall tell their friends about his daughter and the contest. And it worked, she got so far over 1,100 votes and counting. She might not win but can make it to third place. The leader has almost 4000 votes and uses her own big Facebook network to get votes. It is amazing how far a person can come by utilizing social network, this would not have been possible a few years ago.

Even retailers are now using Facebook to mobilize the social network. Walmart offers special deals but only if enough people like a certain wall post. And it seems to work, Walmart started this advertisement a few weeks ago and almost doubled their fan base and traffic on Facebook. And it is perfect advertisement to get the user from FB to Walmart.com




Walmart was in June by around 900,000 fans, now Walmart has over 2.5 million fans. I call this a perfect social Growth.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

Diaspora social network is finally live

A few months ago i blogged about diaspora and how it wants to be the anti Facebook social network. I gave diaspora my doubts and i am still not convinced that diaspora can get big enough to trouble Facebook.

The idea behind diaspora is that the member does own all his info posted. At Facebook you might own the data but all is stored on one of the FB Database servers. Therefore FB has access to your data and uses it for targeted advertisement.

Diaspora does approach this different. Each member does need their own DB and diaspora to host information. The set up is everything than easy. As an example, an Facebook account set up and using FB takes a few minutes. To set up diaspora it takes hours. I posted at the end the instruction. If you are not a geek, i wish you luck. There are ways in the future to buy hosing with diaspora, but then at the end your social network is not free.

Diapause people are calling all these private DBs pods, which are all connected to each other. The recommendation is to use MySQL. Of course you don't need to host your own pod, you can join the pod of a friend or the diaspora founders pod, but then somebody else owns your data again.

The pod idea is actually great, because one of the biggest expenses FB has is the hosting of their 50,000 something servers. The diaspora founders give the hosting into the hands of their members.

Overall a good idea to save money and to have decentralized DBs. However i doubt that it will be big and that everybody can keep their DB secure.


Installing and Running Diaspora

Introduction
Diaspora is run on a network of connected servers, or "pods." This document describes the technical instructions on how to set up a new pod in the network. To join Diaspora, you do not need to set up your own pod--you can join an existing pod running the Diaspora software. The pod you join could be one run by a friend, your university, or the official pod, run by the project’s founders, at joindiaspora.com. All of the Diaspora pods communicate and make up the Diaspora Network.

Notice
We currently run Diaspora with the thin as our webserver, behind nginx. Diaspora uses an asynchronous EventMachine queue inside the appserver to send messages between seeds. If you use mod_rails, mongrel, or another non-eventmachine based application server, federation may not work.

If you don't like thin, you can always try Rainbows! We will try to fully support more webservers later, but that is what works for now.

These instructions are for machines running Ubuntu, Fedora or Mac OS X. We are developing Diaspora for the latest and greatest browsers, so please update your Firefox, Chrome or Safari to the latest and greatest.

Preparing your system
In order to run Diaspora, you will need to download the following dependencies (specific instructions follow):

Build Tools - Packages needed to compile the components that follow.
Ruby - The Ruby programming language. (We're using 1.8.7. It comes preinstalled on Mac OS X.)
MongoDB - A snappy noSQL database.
OpenSSL - An encryption library. (It comes preinstalled on Mac OS X and Ubuntu.)
ImageMagick - An Image processing library used to resize uploaded photos.
Git - The fast version control system.
After you have Ruby installed on your system, you will need to get RubyGems, then install Bundler:

RubyGems - Source for Ruby gems.
Bundler - Gem management tool for Ruby projects.
We suggest using a package management system to download these dependencies. Trust us, it's going to make your life a lot easier. If you're using Mac OS X, you can use homebrew; if you're using Ubuntu, just use Synaptic (it comes pre-installed); if you're using Fedora simply use yum. The instructions below assume you have these installed.

Build Tools
To install build tools on Ubuntu, run the following (includes the gcc and xml parsing dependencies):

sudo apt-get install build-essential libxslt1.1 libxslt1-dev libxml2
To install build tools on Fedora, run the following:

sudo yum install libxslt libxslt-devel libxml2 libxml2-devel
To install build tools on Mac OS X, you need to download and install Xcode.

Ruby
To install Ruby 1.8.7 on Ubuntu, run the following command:

sudo apt-get install ruby-full
Please note that you need to have Universe enabled in your /etc/apt/sources.list file to install ruby using apt-get.

At this time Fedora does not have Ruby 1.8.7. As a workaround it is possible to use rvm with a locally compiled Ruby installation. A semi automated method for doing this is available. It is highly recommended that you review the script before running it so you understand what will occur. The script can be executed by running the following command:

./script/bootstrap-fedora-diaspora.sh
After reviewing and executing the above script you will need to follow the "MongoDB" section and then you should skip all the way down to "Start Mongo".

If you're on Mac OS X, you already have Ruby on your system. Yay!

MongoDB
To install MongoDB on Ubuntu, add the official MongoDB repository here.

For Lucid, add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list (for other distros, see http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Ubuntu+and+Debian+packages):

deb http://downloads.mongodb.org/distros/ubuntu 10.4 10gen
Then run:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv 7F0CEB10
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mongodb-stable
You can also run the binary directly by doing the following:

If you're running a 32-bit system, run:

wget http://fastdl.mongodb.org/linux/mongodb-linux-i686-1.6.2.tgz
If you're running a 64-bit system, run:

wget http://fastdl.mongodb.org/linux/mongodb-linux-x86_64-1.6.2.tgz
Then run:

# extract
tar xzf mongodb-linux-i686-1.4.0.tgz
# create the required data directory
sudo mkdir -p /data/db
sudo chmod -Rv 777 /data/
To install MongoDB on a x86_64 Fedora system, add the official MongoDB repository from MongoDB (http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/CentOS+and+Fedora+Packages) into /etc/yum.repos.d/10gen.repo:

[10gen]
name=10gen Repository
baseurl=http://downloads.mongodb.org/distros/fedora/13/os/x86_64/
gpgcheck=0
enabled=1
Then use yum to install the packages:

sudo yum install mongo-stable mongo-stable-server
If you're running a 32-bit system, run wget http://fastdl.mongodb.org/linux/mongodb-linux-i686-1.6.2.tgz. If you're running a 64-bit system, run wget http://fastdl.mongodb.org/linux/mongodb-linux-x86_64-1.6.2.tgz.

# extract
tar xzf mongodb-linux-i686-1.4.0.tgz
# create the required data directory
sudo mkdir -p /data/db
sudo chmod -Rv 777 /data/
To install MongoDB on Mac OS X, run the following:

brew install mongo
sudo mkdir -p /data/db
sudo chmod -Rv 777 /data/
OpenSSL
If you're running either Ubuntu, Fedora or Mac OS X you already have OpenSSL installed!

ImageMagick
To install ImageMagick on Ubuntu, run the following:

sudo apt-get install imagemagick libmagick9-dev
To install ImageMagick on Fedora, run the following:

sudo yum install ImageMagick
To install ImageMagick on Mac OS X, run the following:

brew install imagemagick
Git
To install Git on Ubuntu, run the following:

sudo apt-get install git-core
To install Git on Fedora, run the following:

sudo yum install git
To install Git on Mac OS X, run the following:

brew install git
Rubygems
On Ubuntu 10.04, run the following:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:maco.m/ruby
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install rubygems
This PPA is maintained by an Ubuntu Developer. For Ubuntu 10.10, this version of rubygems is in the repositories.

You may need to install libxsl first: http://nokogiri.org/tutorials/installing_nokogiri.html

If you are running Ubuntu Server, you might get an error that looks like:

sudo: add-apt-repository: command not found
If this happens, you must first install python-software-properties, which contains the add-apt-repository command:

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
On Fedora, run the following:

sudo yum install rubygems
On Mac OS X, RubyGems comes preinstalled; however, you might need to update it for use with the latest Bundler. To update RubyGems, run sudo gem update --system.

Bundler
After RubyGems is updated, simply run sudo gem install bundler to get Bundler. If you're using Ubuntu repository .debs, bundler is found at /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/bundle

To get bundle work in Ubuntu, you might make a symbolic link:

sudo ln -s /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/bundle /usr/local/bin/bundle
Getting Diaspora
git clone http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora.git
If you have never used github before, their help desk has a pretty awesome guide on getting setup.

Running Diaspora
Install required gems
To start the app server for the first time, you need to use Bundler to install Diaspora's gem depencencies. Run bundle install from Diaspora's root directory. Bundler will also warn you if there is a new dependency and you need to bundle install again.

NOTE: If you do any other rails development on your machine, you will probably want to run bundle install --path vendor instead to install the gems in your local diaspora directory to avoid conflicts with your existing environment.

Start Mongo
If you installed the Ubuntu package, MongoDB should already be running (if not, run service mongodb start). If you installed the binary manually, run sudo mongod from where mongo is installed to start mongo.

If you installed the Fedora package, MongoDB will need to be started via service mongodb start. If you installed the binary manually, run sudo mongod from where Mongo is installed to start Mongo.

If you installed the OsX package through "brew", MongoDB will need to be started via sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.mongodb.mongod.plist. (before you have to go to /Library/LaunchDaemons and add a symlink to /usr/local/Cellar/mongodb/1.6.2-x86_64/org.mongodb.mongod.plist)

Diaspora will not run unless Mongo is running. Mongo will not run by default, and will need to be started every time you wish to use or run the test suite for Diaspora.

Configure Diaspora
For a local development instance, you can skip this step initially.

Otherwise: Diaspora needs to know where on the internet it is. Copy config/app_config.yml.example to config/app_config.yml, put your external url into the pod_url field, and make any other needed configuration changes.

Run the server
For a local development instance, just run ./script/server. This will start both thin, magent and the websocket server. The application is then available at http://localhost:3000. You can change port by editing config/server.sh

If you want to run an app server other than thin, you must run this appserver, the websocket server and magent server separately.

Run the app server
For a local development instance, skip this step - just run ./script/server to get both the app server, magent and websocket server on the right ports.

Once mongo is running and bundler has finished, run bundle exec thin start from the root Diaspora directory. This will start the app server in development mode. It will run on port 3000 by default and you need to either run it on port 80 (probably unwise), or use your webserver of choice (we use nginx) to proxy port 80 at your domain name of choice to thin at port 3000 or over a socket. See config/sprinkle/conf/nginx.conf and config/thin.yml in the repo for an example thin config and nginx server stanza.

Run the websocket and magent server
For a local development instance, skip this step - just run ./script/server to get both the app server, websocket server and magent server on the right ports.

Run bundle exec ruby ./script/websocket_server.rb to start the websocket server on port 8080. Change the port in config/app_config.yml.

Runbundle exec magent start --log-path=log/ to start magent. magent has some options, try -h.

Logging in with a sample user
Run rake db:seed:dev (for a development instance). Then you can log in with user tom and password evankorth. More details in db/seeds/dev.rb and db/seeds/tom.rb.

If you have an error on Mac, try bundle exec rake db:seed:dev --trace

Testing
Diaspora's test suite uses rspec, a behavior driven testing framework. To run the tests: rake spec.

Read-only installation
The directories tmp, public/upload and log must be writable by the user running Diaspora even in a read-only installation.

Some of Diaspora's web content in the public/ folder is generated in runtime. In order to create a read-only installation, this content must be generated at install time instead.

Run sass/haml and create e. g., public/stylesheets/{application,ui,sessions}.css:

rake db:seed:dev
bundle exec thin -d --pid log/thin.pid start
wget http://localhost:3000; rm index.html
bundle exec thin --pid log/thin.pid stop
Run jammit and precache public/assets/*gz files:

bundle exec jammit
After these commands also the public/ folder can be read-only (although public/uploads need to be writable, see above).




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

Saturday, November 27, 2010

Windows 7 mobile - better than expected - Android can't keep up

Microsoft did wait long and almost missed the chance to come with the right mobile OS. Windows 6.5 was ugly too much based on Windows XP and just not working well.
Windows 7 mobile OS is awesome it does not only look totally different but Microsoft seems to understand now that mobile devices are different than PCs. Only a few weeks out and already over 3000 applications available. Microsoft has finally, like Apple, a marketplace for their apps (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsphone/en-us/apps/default.aspx) but to see all available apps, you need either a Windows 7 phone or Zune software con your PC. It is similar concept like iTunes from Apple.



Before Apple did start the app store it was hard to find software for your phone. A windows phone owner had to go through tons of websites to find the software he was looking for. Now with the windows marketplace ( at the end a thanks to Apple) almost all Windows phone software is available in one place even for Windows 6.5. Mac users are out of luck, there is no Zune software for MacOsX. The only way to have Zune is to use parallels or bootcamp. iTunes is available for Windows and MacOsX but has only apps for Apple phones.

The new Windows OS is a perfect consumer OS, easy to use and a beauty to look at it.







The commercials are not lying when they say you spend less on your phone when doing more with your phone. Chris Hall has a very detailed review of the OS. Take your time to read it.


But the other good part of the phone is, that it works from the start for big companies as company phone. Build in office, outlook, exchange, everything an IT operation team is dreaming of. The browser is of course Internet Explorer mobile which does not support HTML5 (yet) but enterprise solutions like Dynamics CRM or SharePoint seem to work well on windows 7 mobile (Microsoft Corp. will integrate its Dynamics CRM cloud strategy with the Windows Phone 7. According to a blog post by the The VAR Guy, Cindy Bates, Microsoft's VP of U.S. Small and Medium Business & Distribution, previewed some forthcoming CRM Online 2011 enhancements, including integration with Windows Phone 7, at the recent SMB Nation conference in Las Vegas. The VAR Guy said the strategy is an attempt by Microsoft to compete more aggressively against Salesforce.com and NetSuite)

I hear from a lot of people that they do prefer to get Windows Phone over an Android phone and i even don't here anybody talking about Blackberry anymore.

Microsoft came late but will be soon number three in the OS market, especially in enterprises and consumer. None of the other competitors can offer both. Android and Apple are clearly only for consumers despite what they are saying, and RIM is everything but a consumer phone.

Kids watch out, your mobile 7 phone does integrate with your best XBox games.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

iPad the best blogging device if there were more blog software

What device is the best for a blogger? A phone, not really. I is great to have it all the time with you to blog whenever something comes in mind, but the screen and keyboard is just too small.
Maybe a PC would be great, big screen and full keyboard, but we are seldom at the PC when we want to blog. We might even forgot what we did want to blog till we are back at the PC. The next close to a PC is a notebook, but you can't lay down and write in your bed or on the coach, it is too heavy.

I started to blog when I bought my iPad, one reason why I never blogged before was that i had no device which made blogging easy. Only when I got the iPad i felt that this is the perfect device to blog. You can carry everywhere you want and only need to be charged every other day. A perfect device for field trips. The screen is big enough and has a build in full size touchscreen keyboard.

My only issue is that i am using blogger from google to blog and for the iPad is only one blog software available to blog to blogger. I could use the website directly to blog, but I need to be online and it is horrible to use.
The only available blog software to blog to blogger through the iPad is blogpress. It is a nice software, only $2.99 and works most of time well. The app is developed by one guy and he answers every email, when i have issues, but unfortunately the app is great but not perfect. I am really disappointed that there are not more blog software for the iPad ( there are few more but they all don't support google blogger). It is actually funny that there are more blogger software for the iPhone than the iPad, I could never use the iPhone for blogging. If you have wordpress for your blogs then you have much more choices.



Blogpress has issues with location recognition and when you use blogpress picture upload instead picasa then your pictures get deleted from your picture library after upload, otherwise it is simple and easy to use. You can save drafts, online and offline and the beauty is you can instantly post your blog to twitter and Facebook. I would like to see other social networks like linkedin.

It is really interesting that there is for the perfect blogging device only a handful blog software and only one which supports Google blogger.
I thought with over 50,000 iPad native apps there should be more.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

How to print with iPad and iPhone? Printopia is the answer.

With the latest OS update the iPad and iPhone are now supporting to print. Apple calls this feature air print. But before we are too much excited, we need to understand that air print uses wifi and not many wifi enabled printers are supported. Here is the list:
AirPrint-enabled printers
HP Envy e-All-in-One series (D410a)
HP Photosmart Plus e-AiO (B210a)
HP Photosmart Premium e-AiO (C310a)
HP Photosmart Premium Fax e-AiO (C410a)
HP Photosmart e-AiO (D110)
HP Photosmart eStation (C510)
HP LaserJet Pro M1536dnf Multifunction Printer
HP LaserJet Pro CM1415fn Color Multifunction Printer
HP LaserJet Pro CM1415fnw Color Multifunction Printer
HP LaserJet Pro CP1525n Color Printer
HP LaserJet Pro CP1525nw Color Printer

If you have a Brother wifi printer then you might be able to use the Brother app in the app store to print and to scan. However my MFC is not supported. The Brother app does only support few of their printers.




The best alternative right now is printopia an application from ecamm.com. It costs $9.95 but is every penny worth.
The beauty of this application is, that it gets installed on the Mac and not on your mobile device. Any printer which is connected to your mac either over wifi or USB can be used to be an air printer. I have a photo printer which is not wireless and works like a champ. The installation is easy. Just download unzipped install (only for Apple). The app will be installed in system preferences.




As soon your mobile device is in same wifi network you can print. Using AirPrint from Apple. If you want to print and you don't have an HP wifi printer as stated above, you should invest into printopia, if you have an apple computer.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

My black Friday

First before i start, I have to admit that i am a big Apple fan, and our household has almost every Apple device (MacBook Pro, iMac 27inch, 2 iPhones 4, 2 iPads, 2 iPod nanos, one old apple TV and one of the new small ones, one Airport extreme and one time capsule). There is not much missing, i believe.

Apple had this year some black friday sales, but to be honest the discount was ridicules low in comparison to other retailers. The iPad gave us some in the 40es saving, the notebooks $100, the iPod nano $11.
We get more savings when we buy the products at macmall.com because we don't need to pay tax.

On Friday, instead going shopping I decided to update my iPhones and iPads to latest OS version. The chaos did start. First the iPad, according to ITunes the update was done, but I could not use my movies on the iPad because it said it is canceling syncing.



Even reboot of the iPad did not work. Another sync was necessary. Next step was the iPhone. Much more trouble, after updating the software the iPhone did not start anymore. I had to made a hard reset and get into recovery mode. I keep my iTunes always up to date, but this does not mean the iPhone got back in latest status. It did sync everything but i have over 180 apps on my iPhone very nice organized in 12 folders. Of course this part did not work, and i had to spend again two hours to group the apps.
Next i decided to watch some of my movies through my old Apple TV (160GB). I don't sync the movies but somehow the apple TV did not recognize all my movies from the library, or had an alert they will not play on my Apple TV. I had to reboot the Apple TV and to connect and sync again to my iTunes.
It was time to relax and to read some news. For this I chose one of the best rated paper, the New York Times for the iPad.
The NY Times crashes all the time and it did not make fun to read it. I learned when i leave the app when directly in an article and I reopen the app, it crashes when the article is not online anymore. This happens for me with one article that i even could not run the app anymore. I had to delete the application and then reinstall again.
Now it was time to blog about all this. I chose the only blog app for iPad which supports blogspot from google. I had to give up trying to blog, because every 3 second came an alert that it can't find my location.




Bottom line i am getting frustrated with Apple products since Apple is going mainstream. The quality is going down.
The quality of the apps in the app store is many times poor, which is partly Apple's fault, they should do a better job verifying of the applications before giving them to the consumers.
The OS seems to have more of bugs than the first iOS.
My black Friday was black as black it could be.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

Friday, November 26, 2010

Google Chrome OS too late?

Google is releasing soon their new OS called Google Chrome. It is named like their browser and is similar. The OS is basically an embedded small OS with an browser only. The idea is that the user does not need to store anything on the local device like google docs or windows 365 today, plus not the need to have any application installed on the device. All is coming from the cloud.
The idea was great before iOS and Android came out for smart phones and other mobile devices. The beauty of the ChromeOs is that it does start instantly instead of taking minutes like other OSs.
But really bad is that the user needs to have Internet connection to access the data or applications. For a consumer device just useless, not only because we don't have all the time Internet access, but as well because Android (which is as well a google OS) is so fast to start and offers 80,000 software many of them free or very cheap. And the beauty is the user can store data and play games, or use any software without having Internet connection.

Maybe ChromeOS is target for businesses where the users are always connected to the Internet.
Linus Upson, Google's (GOOG) vice president for engineering in charge of Chrome had some big words for the NYTimes on their soon-to-be-released OS. "ChromeOS machines could immediately replace 60% of the Windows desktops in the corporate market," he said.

Why can he say this? I believe he did his homework and figured out the more than the half of the work we do at business we don't need software on the local machine or store data. And this is true. Many companies are using for their enterprise solutions web based applications, and employees are many times not allowed to store data on their local hard drive, but into an intranet to give everybody access who needs it.

Microsoft office could be run over the internet as well. Many users don't need heavy machines with big hard drives etc. It would be so much easier for IT operation to handle updates or to distribute software when all would be just on one server. No need anymore for endless configuration of notebooks or desktops.

But if Google wants to replace Microsoft then they should hurry. MS is already offering all their Office software and even CRM as SaaS solution, it will be hart for Google to compete. Google approach is to offer it free but with advertisement. But enterprises are rather preferring to pay for advertisement free service and much more important, for good support. Google is not famous for good support. And i believe the after sale support is the key to success. It does not matter how much a company can save, as long the support is bad. Linux did not make it very well into businesses because of not best post sales service and support. And flawless software or at least the confidence somebody will help within 24 hours is critical for companies.

I believe ChromesOS will be not much more successful than Google Wave. It was a good idea a few years ago, but not anymore.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

Apple FaceTime soon over?

Apple's FaceTime might be soon be renamed, if Facebook will get a patent to the word "face". Or Apple might need to pay to Facebook a big amount of money if FaceTime falls under the patent law.
It seems to be an easy way for Facebook to get some cash in.
I wondering why it is even allowed to patent something which is a common word.

Paul Sakuma/Associated Press
Facebook is a few steps away from getting a trademark on the word “face” with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, according to a document discovered by the technology blog TechCrunch, which it wrote about on Tuesday.

According to the document and filing, Facebook was informed on Tuesday that it could move to the next phase of the trademark process, which will include paying a fee and providing a “Statement of Use” illustrating how the word will be used in the real world and online once it has been trademarked.

So does that mean Facebook will be able to stop people from using the word “face” unless they are willing to send a check to Mark Zuckerberg, above, a company founder? Not exactly.

As the Patent and Trademark Office points out, the trademark will apply only to “telecommunication services, namely, providing online chat rooms and electronic bulletin boards for transmission of messages among computer users.”

But that still limits the use of the word for businesses when it comes to the modern-day world, as almost every business has a Web page, Twitter or Facebook account associated with it.

There are some options for people who want to a “face”-like alternative for the name of their company or start-up. A quick perusal of the thesaurus offers some options, including countenance, mug, physiognomy, veneer, front, display and facade. I guess they just don’t have the same ring to them as “face.”

The latest development is sure to inspire more frustration with the Patent and Trademark Office. For the past several years it has approved a number of strange requests related to the Internet and start-ups.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com


Thursday, November 18, 2010

What is the difference between Apple TV and Google TV?

Let me get it straight, both devices are for watching TV from your bed or couch.

What would you prefer as remote?

Apple TV remotes:









Google TV remotes (Sony and Logitech):






Who do you think understands the consumer better?


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Spring Hill,United States

Google Street view in Germany

Google finally made street view in Germany available. However with some limitations.
First of all there are only 20 cities with Street view available (München, Köln, Hamburg, Berlin, Stuttgart and few others). Second Google went in Germany through a big debate of privacy and had to allow Germans to opt out their house from street view. Over 250,000 home owners did sign the opt out.
As a result there are buildings blur on street view.



If the building is a skyscraper or an department complex and only one party does not want to have their property shown on street view then the whole building is blur. If the building is not clear defined then the whole street is unsharp.
The original opt out phase is over, however home owners can anytime ask to get their house blurred. It is an easy process by using google maps. You just need to type your street address, switch to street view and click on the link "Ein Problem melden" (Submit an issue). The user marks the building and fills out a form. It will take between 4 to 12 weeks till the building is blurred by Google.



Google had to hire 200 more people to manual blur the images. Their software could not do it automatically. Unfortunately they manual blur process has disadvantages, it takes long and not all photos of the same building are blurred. Depending on viewing angle or zoom the building might be still viewable.

Germans are much more concerned on privacy than Americans. Which is funny. Germans like to be naked in the English Garden (Park in Munich), but don't want to have their house in the Internet. Americans can't even breast feed their baby in front of friends but love to show their house, car and boat.

I think the big difference is, that Germans like to decide when and who sees what. And Google is taking this freedom away.

Because Google had to stop their image capturing and restart it after some data collection issues, you will see some buildings in a summer light and then the next building in the same street with snow on it. If google accidentally did capture people, they have ( I believe) to blur the faces too, because in Germany we are not allowed to show photos from people in the press without their permit. For me google is a kind of press.

Some pictures are over two years old, therefore you can see in Cologne still the City Archive which collapsed last year.

(the grey building on the left)




But when you turn the view to the construction you will see that the archive is collapsed (the small image in grey box)





Google is not blurring the original photos in case Germany does change its mind.
Google official statement is that they keep a copy in case they made a mistake with blurring. I am not sure if this a breach of the privacy rules.

Overall it is nice for me to see again some of my old homes and cities.

Street view is not working on the iPad, I will test a little more tomorrow on my notebook.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Spring Hill,United States

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Google is speeding up and goes fashion

The last few months we read a lot about facebook and their new features. The latest is their email service. But all new at Facebook is within their core business and network. If nobody would use Facebook anymore, they would not have anything left.

Google is different, they started as a search engine and bought many companies which are using the google search engine but can pretty well survive without a google.com page.

In the last two weeks, google came with at least two new cool things. First they extended goggles. Before Goggles allowed users to make a picture of something and send this to google and within seconds search results are coming back. You might make a picture of a celebrity but you are not sure if it is really Julia Roberts. Send it to goggles and you will find out.
Now brands can buy into the results. It is like a QR code steroids. Google did start with 5 brands. When you as an example take a picture of a certain Delta poster, goggle will give a special brand page from Delta back as first search result.

This week google did something totally new. They opened a new fashion search engine (funny geeks and fashion) called boutiques.com.



This fashion site got launched on Wednesday and is as well available as iPad app.
Google did acquire last year like.com which builds the core team for boutiques.com.
I worked as a consultant many years in fashion like Polo Ralph Lauren, Hugo Boss and Tom Ford therefore I am always interested in new fashion sites. Fashion and jewelry is always hard to present in the Internet, it is almost not possible to show the real beauty.

The boutiques.com website:
This is a totally different e-commerce experience for fashion, it is not as beautiful like polo.com or gucci.com but it has tons of features and one of the highest image qualities I saw so far in the Internet.
The website is grouped by fashion designer, celebrity, blogger, retailer, trend and so on.
But sorry all fashion men in the world, boutiques does only offer products for women.
The shown celebrities like the Olsen sisters are paid to be part of boutiques.com, bit this is fine.
Google did a really goof job in indexing the images the text, the price, basically everything on the page. If you search for lavender, you get lavender back. Google did not tag the images with colors but did learn their search engine to recognize colors and it works amazing. They learned the search engine hundreds of colors and when ever a new product image is uploaded it recognize instantly the color.



As a user you can like and hate each product and build your own boutique in there.
You can take a styling quiz to customize boutiques to your taste and you can share each item with twitter or email (sorry facebook, but google does not like you anymore).
Taking the fashion quiz will take about 10 minutes. You need to have an account to do so and disappointing is that I needed to create a new one, i could use my existing gmail account.
Below an image of my personal boutique. Even if I selected red and pink as my favorite colors, most of the items are black.



You can save items to your personal boutique, others can follow your boutique.
Each item is a click away. Google does not sell the items it is basically a search engine for fashion.
Selecting an item will go to the sellers store like zappos.com.

The iPad app:




The biggest disappointment is that the iPad app does not rotate, you have to surf in landscape. I seldom use my iPad in landscape and I don't think google should force me to use it in landscape.
But the beauty of the app is that the user keeps all the time in the app instead of click away.




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Spring Hill,United States

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Androids are cool but is this enough

Android OS is the fast selling smart phone OS and installed on the most upcoming i-devices. Bit the biggest challenge Google has that there is not a really good app store like Apple has. Yeah for smart phones the android app store works, but not for anything with bigger screens like the Dell Streak (5 inches) or the Samsung Galaxy (7 inches).

The beauty on the Apple app store is that we instantly know which app is build for iPhone or for iPad.



Google says that all android devices will run all app, this is true, as all ipads are running iPhone apps, however bigger screens do need different UI than smaller screens.

Google does make this hard for the consumer and for developers. Google app portal has not a really good search and if even developers would build apps for bigger screens it would be hard to find.



For developers it is not easy to develop for for different screens neither, they have to test it on 5inch, 7inch and 10 inch devices with different hardware and Android versions.

Building today an app for Androids is like building an App for Windows PC. A developer needs to spend more time on testing than coding.
As much many people don't like the closed system from Apple, it is much easier to develop against two OS versions and only two type of hardware.

Google will be eventual the Microsoft of i-devices and sometimes own 70 % of the market, but Apple will be more beautiful and just work better.

The really sad point is that many are used to have crashes with their PC, spending hours to get games running and to install anti virus software, that Google can afford to have Android as it is. We take it so normal all these issues and security problems that we think an I-device need to be like this because it is like a computer.

I say no, we should have learned and be frustrated with PCs that we all should tell Google to do it better. Open source is cool as long it makes the life better, android does not.

If you are not a geek, and you don't want to spend hours in customizing your i-device or installing a anti virus software, or you don't want to spend hours in reading manuals. Then buy a device from Apple. You don't have all freedom you wish to, but you save a lot of time cursing and frustration.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

Another reason why not choosing an Android phone

We heard Steve saying that the biggest difference between iOS and Android is, that android has too many different versions. I blogged a while that Android phones are not secure at all. Netflix says both.

Netflix is on iOS devices and on Windows 7 mobile phones but not on Androids yet and maybe never.

See the latest blog from Netflix:

We regard Android as an exciting technology that drives a range of great devices that our members could use to instantly watch TV shows and movies from Netflix. We are eager to launch on these devices and are disappointed that we haven’t been able to do so already. The hurdle has been the lack of a generic and complete platform security and content protection mechanism available for Android. The same security issues that have led to piracy concerns on the Android platform have made it difficult for us to secure a common Digital Rights Management (DRM) system on these devices. Setting aside the debate around the value of content protection and DRM, they are requirements we must fulfill in order to obtain content from major studios for our subscribers to enjoy. Although we don’t have a common platform security mechanism and DRM, we are able to work with individual handset manufacturers to add content protection to their devices. Unfortunately, this is a much slower approach and leads to a fragmented experience on Android, in which some handsets will have access to Netflix and others won’t. This clearly is not the preferred solution, and we regret the confusion it might create for consumers. However, we believe that providing the service for some Android device owners is better than denying it to everyone.

We live to get Netflix on new devices, so the current lack of an Android-generic approach to quickly get to all Android devices is frustrating. But I’m happy to announce we’ll launch select Android devices that will instantly stream from Netflix early next year. We will also continue to work with the Android community, handset manufacturers, carriers, and other service providers to develop a standard, platform-wide solution that allows content providers to deliver their services to all Android-based devices. I’ll keep you updated on our progress.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Spring Hill,United States

iOS 4.2 for iPad delayed till end of November

Rumors surrounding Apple’s latest update iOS 4.2 don't just cease to surface just like the rumors surrounding the Verizon iPhone 4 release. One after another, the Internet is lightened up with a new ‘information’ regarding the upcoming operating system update.

Apple had released the Golden Master version of iOS 4.2 on November, 1. Thereafter surfaced reports suggesting that the iOS 4.2 was going to be made available to the public on November, 12. However due to the discovery of a WiFi connectivity related bug at the final moment, the launch had to be further delayed. Since Apple had announced that it will release the iOS 4.2 in the global market in November, there is still no clear picture when we actually will get to see the update.

However in a brand new disclosure, the Telegraph has reported that Apple will release iOS 4.2 on November, 24.

Another ongoing debate pertains to JailBreaking iOS 4.2. The developers at Apple have said that all Apple devices on all iOS firmware will come jailbroken. A new unlock for iPhone 3G and 3GS will also be available very soon. It is adviced not to update to iOS 4.2 as it arrives if you own a 3G or 3G S device, and want to unlock it. Neither has there been an unlock for iPhone 4 on iOS 4.2. The developer teamalso asks not update to iOS 4.2 on the iPhone 4 device, if you are looking for unlock.

The iOS 4.2 is being eagerly waited by all iDevice users, specially the iPad useres, who will finally be able to have features like multitasking, which till now only iPhone 3G users had access to. Whle the Verizon iPhone 4 is expected to be released in January 2011 but there are rumors of an announcement possible with iOS 4.2 release as well. So lets wait and watch.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Spring Hill,United States

Friday, November 12, 2010

Xbox kinect - the perfect xxx game box.

The latest news about the kinet is that it got hacked for Mac OS x
mygadgetnews.com:
It was just a few days back when the Kinect hardware for the Xbox 360 got hacked to run on a Windows 7 PC. The fun didn’t stop there though. Thanks to the recently released open source drivers for the Kinect, it has now been hacked to run on a MacBook Pro running Mac OS X. The Kinect on the OS X doesn’t work the same way as it did on Windows 7 though where you had complete control over it’s motors and all. But the potential is there. The possibility of browsing the web, swipe pictures, and play video games in a Kinect-style with the new controller on your Mac or PC makes it very interesting. The Kinect can currently do multitouch as well.

However the better news is that already adult industry is looking into some XXX games for the kinect.

I can soon see a game from Dr. Ruth which she is sitting in a chair and tells the couple what position they should try in the bedroom. The couple is trying it and the kinect will observe if the position is correct. The longer and faster the couple can hold the position the more points they get.
Dr Ruth will safe again millions of couples but this time in an interactive game.

Or a game from Ginger Lynn.
The male player switches the game on and Ginger will appear on the screen and explain to the player he has to warm up. He should take his hand to his jewels and start to move in the right rhythm. The better the more points mad the more levels he can unlock.
The next level is then having Ginger in the bed and the player has to move in certain ways to get her pleasure.

Xbox kinect is the next step to cyber sex.

Can't wait till I need to go to a XXX store to buy my game and take it out of store in a paper bag.





- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

Location:Woodcrest Rd,Spring Hill,United States

Who needs a Facebook email?

According to TechCrunch, Facebook will offer email service, starting on Monday. Rumors of a Facebook e-mail service first surfaced in February. At the time, it was suggested that your Facebook vanity URL might be automatically assigned to you as your @facebook.com e-mail address.



As far I know, to be a member at Facebook you need to to have an email address, why another one?

I had in my life maybe 50 different email addresses the only one which only twice changed, is my very private one (i changed it when I got married and took my wife's name and changed it back when i got divorced). Email addresses are like phone numbers you don't want to change them only if you must, otherwise it is such hassle to inform everybody.

Then there are the email addresses we use for things we know we will get spam, these accounts we don't care and change a couple of time. And then we might have an email address for things our spouse should not know about or for flirting etc.

I don't want to have a vanity url email address at facebook, otherwise I will get emails from 500 million people. I don't want to use a Facebook email for spam otherwise my Facebook page get full of spam.

I don't want to use a Facebook email for cheating or flirting otherwise the recipient would instantly find out who I am and who my friends are and if I lie or not.

The rumors are saying that these email comes with a full blown online email client. I think this is the better news. There is still space in the universe for another web based email service. But should it be facebook? Google had big times issues with gmail and user privacy. First when they launched and searched all emails to serve better personalized ads, and then when they had buzz and assuming that people are friends only because they had many emails going forward and back.

Facebook has much more info about their users and everybody who seriously thinks this would not influence the email service must be mistaken.

And don't forget every new big feature from Facebook did violate privacy and needed to be corrected as soon it got public.

The service will be free but not free of advertisement, perfect personalized ads in the client. Pretty sure many privacy concerns are just a few steps away.

Supposedly the email service allows imap and pop which allows the user to connect the email to offline clients like outlook. Yippie computer crashes after 3 hours because everybody gets from everybody emails.

Facebook would have from one day to another the biggest email network, if everybody would get from the beginning an email addresses.

But i think only hard core Facebook fans and bloggers who are testing the service would want to have a Facebook email.

The only way that Facebook could be successful with the service, is the email service is much more optimized for social (what ever it means) and is at least as good as Google Gmail.

Let us see what will be announced and if it is email then be sure you can soon email me to my Facebook account till I know if it is a good service or not.

Looking back, it is interesting how Facebook tries to fight against google, they are not only fighting about products and services but they even steel employees from
Google. It is so bad that google gave everybody a 10% raise and a $1000 Christmas bonus.

On the other hand google and Apple are fighting for mobile and browser market.
And then google is trying to get a hold on PC Os a small try to fight with MS. All this could be a problem for Google and the right time for Facebook. Google is too much concentrated to comet with others than with their own business.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Spring Hill,United States

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Photos- the next social frontier

Many of us are using flickr, Apple me, google picasa or for uploading their images into the internet to make them viewable for friends and sometimes the rest of the world. But it seems that till now advertising did not really take advantage of it.
More and more smart phones have high resolution image capture of 5MB even 8MB photos and the most important part they have geo tagging. And there are more and more pocket cameras with GPS for geo tagging.
I am imagine a new photo/travel service coming up. A portal to upload picture and for others to see them on map.
I travel a lot, i might want to upload images from my trip, maybe only images from buildings or nature. Other people can see them and maybe decide to go to a small town like Bretten in Germany because they liked what they saw. I know this is not really new, other services are already offering this.
But what if this portal is a travel portal, and we can not only upload images with geo information but as well Twitter tweets with things what we ate or saw etc. Twitter already has Geo data capturing when we use our phone for the tweets. Basically everybody can have in this portal their own travel guide with real time info and locations.
Financed is this service from local stores and restaurant and global brands. An user might upload a picture of the eiffel tower and tweet how he liked the food in Paris. A local restaurant bought ad space and the restaurant shows up in the page like in the yellow pages with current menu.
This is just a high level of the idea, but I see here a great method to get local advertisement where it makes sense.
Everybody is talking since years about better local advertisement, but nobody really found the golden egg. This is the golden egg, because the ads would reach travelers and friends.
To give this service more hype, an user would get for each uploaded photo points, enough points will give the user a coupon for a local business nearby the users current location. When a tagged image is uploaded a local business shows up and the user can rate it to get more points. Every other user who looks at the pictures and clicks on one of the shown local ads (local to image location, not local to viewer location) will give the person who clicks a coupon.
This service will have mobile version as well. On mobile devices the user can collect QR codes instead of print coupons. These QR codes are the coupons which the local store can scan to give the user discount.
These codes or always unique and only valid for one scan. As soon it is scanned the target page to redeem is not available anymore.

The user has to use his facebook account, to register on this travel portal. This helps the user not to remember another login and the portals owner can better customize and personalize the page to the users interests.

To be a member of this portal the user need to have an invitation from another Facebook user similar like rockmelt is doing.
And of course it can run as well as a Facebook app. And because myspace is coming back, the portal would show to the images the favorite songs of the person who did upload the photos.

A portal like this would combine social like Twitter and Facebook, geo tagging, QR Codes, coupons, loyalty points and local ads in one place without annoying the users.

These are all the latest trends combine in one. Why is not anybody thinking about this?

Or do i miss something why it should not work?

You want to know more about the concept? Email me and I will tell you more in details.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Spring Hill,United States

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

iPad dual boot Mac OS X and iOS

Before the iPad came out there was a big discussion if the iPad will have dual boot.
Of course it did not have it.
Since then the iPad has been hacked numerous times to run pieces of code never meant for the device, such as Flash or even Windows 95, but so far, the hacks were limited in term of added capabilities. A coder who downloaded the Chrome OS source code on the chromiumos.org website managed to tweak the source of the Google operating system to work on an iPad, and compiled it. The result? A Chrome OS powered iPad, a hack that most engineers in Cupertino must be cringing about.

A video has been posted on YouTube by user Hexxeh, a seasoned coder who regularly compiles custom builds of Google’s operating system. Dubbed “ChromePad”, the hacked iPad seems to be running the Chrome web browser flawlessly, and seems to be responding to user inputs. The video doesn’t show much more, but getting to that point is already quite an accomplishment.

Besides these attempts i hear many times from co workers that the iPad would be perfect if it had dual boot for MacOs X and iOS. First thought oh yeah, but after thinking about it, i don't see a reason.

Why do we need? I can do all with my iPad I need to do, I still need my notebook because it is faster and bigger display.
We could argue with MacOs X we can have MS office on it. But I dot need it, i have pages, numbers and keynote on the iPad and it works just fine. Outlook? No need mail has exchange connection, ah maybe for calendar and meetings. No not really, calendar on the iPad jet works fine with Exchange. I schedule meetings, I accept meeting and I even decline them, all synced with my PC thanks to Exchange.
Sometimes in a meeting I need to connect to a real computer to run software which is not available for the iPad. No problem I use VPN software and see full screen on the iPad.
Ok, I am not a developer, but do we really want to develop on a 9.7 inch display?

Then there are some big enterprise apps build for PC, guess what they have an app for this, like Dynamics CRM for the iPad.

IOS is missing multi tasking on the iPad, but only till Friday then we all can have this and run multiple apps at the same time.

I don't miss anything and can right now not think at anything i would need MacOSX, i believe it is just an excuse of some people not to buy an iPad. They expect from a device this price to be more like a full computer, and guess again it is not necessary, other pads are not cheaper and I save so much money with my iPad because the apps are cheaper and the amount of different apps is great.
And i save tons of money for children games. Do you know how expensive leapfrog is? (read an old blog of mine about kids games).
MacOSX is not designed for touch and would need an overhaul, I most likely would see in the future a mixed of both as one OS.

Did i already say that i read in average 60 minutes more a day because I have the iPad with just iOS? The knowledge I build is so much more than the $829 i paid. Which is not totally true. I actually paid nothing, because i sold in May a few in Germany with some good markup.
iPad is not perfect, and not a full computer, but I knew it when I bought the iPad. My iMac i7 is beautiful but less in use since the iPad moved in our house.

The iPad is the first computer we have which is truly a family computer and in use from everybody, and this opens only one thing i am missing on iOS, not to be able to have multiple user accounts on one iPad.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Spring Hill,United States

Google instant preview available

Google had a few days instant preview on their google experimental website. Google showed this feature even directly on their homepage.



The idea is that user can click on a magnifier in the search results to see a preview of the page. A function ask.com had a log time, but never took off because the images were cashed and too old. Google is promising more recent screenshots.
This function was first seen in the UK a few months ago and now here in the US.





Unfortunately when i started with the blog to make some screenshots the function was not working on the iPad besides displaying the option to test.




I instantly opened Safari on my MacBook Pro and it worked fine. Some search results have a magnifier which indicates there is an instant preview and the images are pretty recent. I used the windows example because I know Microsoft is changing this page all the time. I tested the search term windows365. The images are very low res and hard to see details.
Google gets more and more complex and I feel that the speed is going down and speed is something which feels important.
Google has now so much going on that it is hard to find what we are looking for. The intend is to make it easier but instant search, instant preview and the left hand navigation is for my taste too much.






- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Spring Hill,United States

Friday, November 5, 2010

Skyfire back in app store - for now

Skyfire is releasing in batches their app on the app store to ensure they can handle these high requests to their server. You might be able to buy it now but not in an hour but then again in six hours and so on.
CEO of skyfire did blog about the approach.



But still i stay with my words that skyfire is not worth to pay $3 for the things we gain. If it would be a free application, then download, but paying $3 is just right now wasting money, till they can come up with a better approach. Just watching flash video is not enough especially most flash video sides have as well HTML 5 versions for mobile.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

How young is too young?

I read yesterday at the NYTimes the following article.

YOU'RE THE BOSS: When the Tech Guy Is 13 (or Even 10)
You can save a lot of money hiring youthful technology experts, but there are risks.
http://nyti.ms/adzW77

It is about two 11 years old kids, who did develop with 10 years a professional website for $700, which would have cost multiple thousand dollars made from adults.
And some other stories in this article about kids and how fit they are on computers.
Bottom line I agree that younger people are getting better with new technology. I am right now over 40 but was as a teenager so fit with my computer (C 64) that i was allowed to teach at school informatics because I knew more about coding than any teacher at our school. My son is less than 3 years old and know more about computers than me when I was 8.

However the question is how young are we allowed to be to sell coding service? As a parent i would not allow to do this kind of paid work if my son would be under 14. Or if, then he has to be paid like an adult if his work is as good. Otherwise we are supporting underpaid child work.
Countries like the US or Germany do not tolerate children work in 3rd world countries but we think it is cool if a 10 year old kid does build for businesses websites or networks and get paid a tenth of an adult. This is almost double moral.

Again i am impressed about the children who know how to code etc, but it should not be used to get good but inexpensive work done.

Better allow them to do an internship and help them to develop and give them a chance to finance their school with the option to hire them after they finished school.

As a child i had talent, but I missed a mentor who could help me to develop my skills which my parents might not could help me. These kids need help to grow with their talent and not some few bucks for professional work.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Spring Hill,United States

Google mobile instant search - i have it now

Yesterday i wrote that google instant search for mobile is out but that i could not see it on my iPhone or iPad.
Today it was finally available on my iPhone (but not on the iPad).





As you can see during writing does appear search results below search box, however the screen is too small to see really the results, especially that the keyboard is blocking it.

Different than the iPad or Android phones, we are on the iPhone not able to switch keyboard off and on.

To use instant search you have at the first time switch this function on. Which is displayed underneath the search box of google.com.



I prefer to keep it off, it is more confusing and not helpful on the iPhone.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

Location:Woodcrest Rd,Spring Hill,United States

Thursday, November 4, 2010

Google instant search for mobile

Google released on Thursday instant search for for iOs 4 and Android 2.2 as beta. Which follows after two months on instant search for PC. Instant search should reduce the search time because search results get displayed during writing. Some are saying that search time is even longer because we look at results when starting to type instead of finishing typing.

I tested it with my iPhone by typing Walmart. I get in the suggestion box pretty early the walmart domain without finishing the word. The mobile screen is so small that the keyboard is covering half of the screen, that I can't tell if there are any search results in the page shown. Technology to display the text is Ajax and html5 to avoid reloads during typing.



I tested the same on the iPad with target and same result, but there the keyboard is not covering the page, but still don't see any results in the page only in suggestion box, which exist since a long time.




With bing I get the same but does not claim instant results.




Google is claiming that this rollout is not yet for everybody available. Maybe I have to wait to see real instant search.
Solsie is showing a video how it is working on an Android phone.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Spring Hill,United States

58 inch iPhone table, real or fake?

Decide yourself if the following video is real or not. Especially look at second 16. When he starts the table "app" he has his small finger pretty close to the off button, which brings the phone in sleep when hit.
To have a such big multi touch would costs a lot but would be awesome. Will see if it is real or not, but it is.



They claim to be three developers from Austria, having the idea three years ago (like many of us) but could finally work on it this year.

They have a little blog about the table. Watch out for updates on their page.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Spring Hill,United States

Skyfire official press release why sold out.

Skyfire was only available for 5 hours and was for this time supposedly #1 sold application in the app store.
The demand was and is high to get a browser which supports flash. Now the browser is not really supporting flash but when you surf with skyfire a website which has some simple flash content like flash video then the request goes through skyfire server and before it will be pushed to your browser the server will render the flash as HTML 5. This is the none technical explanation. It seems the server requests were so high that their server could not keep up. Skyfire took the application down from Apple app store, avoid more traffic which can not be handled.
When I reported yesterday that skyfire does not woke then it could be only because their servers are over capacity. I don't know.
Either way everybody who paid $3 for seeing flash content is screwed right now because it won't work till skyfire fixes the issue (if they can).
Skyfire is saying we can befriend with Facebook to get info when the app is again available.
Maybe it was just a marketing trick to get as many downloads as possible to make some good money ANC to get millions of followers. Maybe it never worked on the iPhone, but they hoped by getting 500k downloads and 5 million people being friends in facebook to collect VC and money to build the real thing (i believe it worked and it is not a marketing trick).

What I liked that i reported yesterday that skyfire is already sold out and estimated the hours how long the app was in the store and it was exactly what others today reported.




Official Press Release: (courtesy of Engadget)
Skyfire Becomes Top Grossing iPhone App in App Store and Sells Out of Inventory in Five Hours
Historic demand forces mobile browser to halt new sales and expand server capacity within hours of availability
Mountain View - Skyfire, the first iPhone browser that plays video designed for Adobe Flash Player, is announcing that they have sold out of inventory within five hours of its public launch.
Skyfire for iPhone has been received with overwhelming enthusiasm -- far beyond internal projections. The result: the company is currently sold out of its first batch of Skyfire for the iPhone and is temporarily not accepting new purchases. The company is working to increase capacity and will be accepting new purchases from the Apple App StoreSM soon.
Skyfire is assuring users that the app's sold out status was a temporary measure taken by Skyfire, and was not the decision of Apple, Inc., which has approved the app.
The app, previously available in the Apple App StoreSM for $2.99, bridges one major gap between Apple and Adobe technologies, enabling consumers to view millions of previously unavailable videos designed for Flash Player on Apple iOS devices.
The company which became the top grossing app in iTunes today ahead of popular titles like Angry Birds, experienced overwhelming consumer demand for its browser within hours of going live. The company is no stranger to consumer demand of its products as its Android browser generated over one million downloads in its first few months.
"Skyfire has historically generated high demand for its browser products but nothing like this," states Skyfire CEO Jeffrey Glueck. "It was hard to predict consumer demand since this was our first paid app, but we were blown away by the demand and sales."
The company plans to open another batch of its iPhone application in the near future. It recommends interested customers follow the company on Twitter @skyfire or on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/GetSkyfire.iPhone for the new availability batch.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

Location:Woodcrest Rd,Spring Hill,United States

Google instant now on mobile

Google released a few months ago google instant for PC. When typing a search, google will display possible results underneath the search box, which should save a few seconds to find the right page. Some people are claiming that because of this feature the searching takes longer, because we instantly look at displayed results instead of typing the full word. I did blog about this in september (you can find it in the archive).

Since today a version of google instant is available on the mobile devices like iPhone, androids and iPad. Google uses Ajax and HTML 5 for displaying to avoid reloads of the page. It is still in beta and because of the small screen of iPhone or android phones it is not so much impressive but it works well.

I searched on the iPhone for Walmart and the walmart domain came instantly up after typing a few letters.







The keyboard is covering the half of the screen that eventual displayed ads are not shown.

I got similar result on the iPad when searching for target. But did not see any results underneath of the search box like on the PC but at least in the suggestion box.





Solsie did post a video to show how it works. Currently it is only working when using google through a browser directly not using the the search box. And it is only supported by Android 2.2 and iOS 4.1


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com