What we’ve got, then, isn’t a case of locking the stable door after the horse has bolted: it’s a case of locking the stable door after the horse has evolved opposable thumbs, learnt to drive cars and driven through the stable in a Challenger tank. It’s far too late for Netscape and Microsoft’s browser share will never recapture its near-total control of the internet.
It’s not going to make much difference to the minority browsers, either.
Author: Carrie
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Unintended consequences: why Windows’ new browser choice screen will only help Chrome
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Could Spotify work for ebooks?
As long term readers will know, I’m amazed by the way in which the music business spent more than ten years missing every business opportunity the Internet brought them, effectively handing their entire business over to the pirates. Services such as Spotify should have turned up a long time ago.
Could the same kind of thing work for ebooks? Is there enough ad money to go round? Do book readers want to social network?
we have real-world equivalents for both its free and subscriber services. Libraries give books away for nothing – or seem to; in reality authors get a little bit of money in the form of Public Lending Right (PLR) royalties, a gap that online ad revenues could easily plug – while book clubs have offered heavily discounted prices to subscribers for decades.
Could similar ideas work online?
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Stop insulting the elderly with crappy technology
It’s Tuesday. It’s Techradar time…
Sagem’s Cosyphone is aimed at the over-50s. Not only does it have really big buttons and numbers, but it has near field communications technology, too. Need to call somebody? Why not wave a big picture of them in the air, like a simpleton? “It uses cards, which can be customised with a photo or other information and pre-programmed with the number of the doctor’s surgery, or a friend or relative. To make a call, the user simply “waves” their phone over that card to speak to that person or send a text message.”
Remember, this is a phone for the over-50s, a group that includes such drooling basket cases as Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Bill Gates and Chuck Norris – people who continue to do amazing things and who can kick your face off if you look at them funny
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This looks shopped. I can tell by some of the pixels and from having seen a few shops in my time
Photoshop is 20. Happy Birthday, Photoshop!
From whitening teeth in billboard ads to foisting yet more lolcats on the world, its influence is enormous.
Inevitably that influence has been bad as well as good. In the right hands, image manipulation can be undetectable, but all too often Photoshop falls into the hands of the overworked, the shoddy and the idiotic.
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Microsoft gets Windows Mobile right, at last
Hopefully this is part of a bigger trend. For years, technology has become more and more complicated, often for no good reason. I do a monthly radio surgery where listeners phone in with their technology troubles, and more often than not they’re being driven daft by something that should be simple, but isn’t. Far from being an enabler, something that helps us get things done, technology can become a barrier, a binary bouncer that stops us doing the things we want to do.
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Facebook is the budget airline of tech
A year ago today, I said that Facebook had jumped the shark. Now, I’m eating humble pie. Sort of.
So, Facebook is brilliant, I’m a great big numpty and everything in social networking land is groovy.
Not so fast.
Facebook isn’t popular because it’s good. It’s popular because it’s popular.
Facebook is the budget airline of tech.
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On abusive comments
Hi! How are you? Also: up yours! Screw you! Get stuffed!
Welcome to the wonderful world of web comments, where telling somebody to get bent is an acceptable way to say hello.
A wee piece by me over at Techradar about Engadget switching off its comments system due to “trolls and spammers”.
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iPad: it doesn’t have hooves because it isn’t a horse
I wasn’t entirely convinced by the iPad until Steve Jobs announced the price: at $499, it’s a pretty amazing bit of kit. That’s netbook money, and that means it could be a pretty big deal. I’m quite excited about it, because I can think of three people who’d like it a lot: me, Mrs Bigmouth and my mum.
Me and Mrs Bigmouth first. I’ve already got a computer for work, so I’m not greatly bothered by the iPad form factor. What I do need, though, is a replacement for the old Windows laptop I keep downstairs. It’s used for web browsing, Twitter, the odd bit of Facebook, the odd bit of video and the odd bit of typing. The iPad with a dock can do all of that, and it can also do iPlayer (or at least, I can’t think of any reason why it can’t – iPlayer works on iPhone using streaming H.264 video).
Don’t underestimate the power of iPlayer, by the way. It brings Shaun The Sheep to angry toddlers.
I also have a £702/year newspaper habit. Imagine if I could come downstairs in the morning, grab the iPad, and use it as a newspaper. It’s big enough so there’s still the serendipity of seeing articles you might otherwise miss, and it’s digital enough that I can get my news for free (or nearly free, depending on what the Guardian, Sunday Times etc do about online content). When I’m done it becomes a photo frame until Mrs Bigmouth fancies a bit of Facebooking, emailing or newspaper reading.
So: it replaces the laptop, it saves me money. It’s an easy sell. It doesn’t have e-ink, but I wouldn’t be using it long enough for that to be an issue.
Then there’s my mum. She doesn’t really need a computer, but she has one. She uses it for email, for viewing Flickr, and for booking flights. If the iPad can print wirelessly – and I hope it can, because it renders iWork pretty useless if you have to sync with a desktop just to print a letter – then again, replacing her laptop with an iPad is an easy sell.
I’ve written a few other things over at Techradar. First, why I think the iPad is more revolutionary than it appears, and why some of the criticisms so far don’t make sense:
No, it doesn’t have a camera. Why on earth would you want to take photos with something the size of a large paperback book? It doesn’t make phone calls because it’s not a phone. It doesn’t have hooves because it’s not a horse.
Then, whether the iPad is a Kindle killer and a netbook nuker.
The problem is that netbooks are essentially cheap laptops, which is both their strength and their weakness: the price is right but they’re slow, they’ve got small screens and they’re still PCs – with all the complexity, malware and hassle that entails. The iPad, on the other hand, has a much bigger screen, is much simpler, is a proper media device, gets ten hours out of a battery and doubles as an eBook. We wouldn’t want to type on it all day, but then we wouldn’t want to type on the average netbook all day either. We’ve got proper computers for that.
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Tablet hype, yes, but isn’t it fun?
Andy Ihnatko is one of my favourite tech writers, and this Chicago Sun-Times piece is a doozy. It’s about tablets, and hype, and fun.
I like Apple for any number of reasons but at the top of the list is the fact that they’re capable of raising people’s expectations and restoring a sense of joy and delight in technology. Good technology is a creative expression that inspires excitement and awe. It’s no different from the movie trailer that burns the release date in your memory for months, or the song you hear played by a guest on a late-night talk show that makes you pull your notebook into the bed and start buying music downloads before the show even goes into commercial.
This, on the other hand… WARNING! SCOBLE!
Ahh, it seems so long ago when my son and I waited in line to fork over more than $600 each to buy an iPhone. The image above is from the front page of the San Jose Mercury News (I was cheering to many thousands of people who were waiting to get into the store to buy their iPhones and who had waited for up to 38 hours to do so — my son and I were first in line, which was a lot of fun).
I will do it again for WHATEVER Steve Jobs introduces on Wednesday.
Yes, I am a fanboi.
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Will piracy rip the spine out of ebooks?
Over at Techradar, I’ve interviewed the head of digital at Hachette UK, one of the world’s biggest publishers. Are publishers learning from the music industry’s decade of mistakes?
One of the things that sent people to the pirates with music was the problem of file formats: your player wanted X format, the pirate sites had it in X format, but the only legal versions were in Y format.
Publishers are keen to avoid the same thing in books.
