Nokia layoffs = Benefit for US, Sweden. Problem?
Last year, when Microsoft announced it was partnering with Nokia in Windows Phone development, it was widely expected to result in significant staff cutbacks in Nokia's research and development department. In fact, it was part of the agreement. Both Nokia and Microsoft said there would be an R&D handoff. Finland's Minister for Economic Affairs, Mauri Pekkarinen went so far as to say it would result in the biggest structural change that Finland has ever seen in the new technology sector.
Yesterday, Nokia CEO Steven Elop announced major R&D cutbacks...these 10,000 layoffs should have surprised no one.
We can’t expect regulators to become our crowdfunding coaches
Last in a series. In part one, we learned how important crowd funding can be for helping tech startups and the economy. In part two, we worried about how criminals and con men might game the eventual crowdfunding system when it starts in earnest next January. And in this final part I suggest a strategy for crowdfunding success that essentially comes down to carpe diem– seize the day!
Crowdfunding done right will have a huge positive impact on any economy it touches. But by done right I mean done in a manner that maximizes impact and minimizes both corruption and unnecessary complexity. This is not something that must be accomplished specifically through strict regulation, either. I’m not opposed to regulation, just suspicious of it. I’m suspicious of any government policy that purports to be so elegant as to accomplish economic wonders at little or no cost. That just hasn’t happened in my fairly long lifetime so I see no reason to expect things to change.
Apple is the new Compaq
Surely we can blame Tim Cook for that. Wait. You're too young to remember Compaq? Well, Apple's CEO worked there in the 1990s, and his leadership brings some decidedly bad Compaq habits from Texas to California. So for those of you thinking Apple is different under Cook than Steve Jobs, most definitely.
See, my eyes buggered when reading in iFixit's terrific MacBook Pro with Retina Display tear-down: "Unlike previous generations of MacBook Pros, the MacBook Pro with Retina display is guarded by Apple's proprietary pentalobe screws". Proprietary screws? That sounds familiar. Oh yeah. Compaq!
Windows 8 lacks true spirit [review]
I have been testing Windows 8 Release Preview 64-bit for over 10 days now. I have installed it onto a second partition on two computers: Lenovo ThinkPad T61 and desktop clone computer. On both PCs, Windows 7 is also installed as an alternative OS. I set up dual boot using free tool Easy BCD.
My conclusion so far: this is an operating system one can live with, but that hardly justifies upgrading from Windows 7. That is unless you have got a tablet computer and like the new Metro UI. Since I haven't got one, the new Metro UI for me is just a bother -- simply a hindrance for efficient work. Except for this new user interface there is actually hardly anything new, while on the other hand, not one single awkward or archaic concept has been replaced by something new.
Crowdfunding will bring out the crooks and the con men
Second in a series. Legal crowdfunding is coming, as I explained in the first part of this series. Thanks to the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act, investors big and small will soon have new ways to buy shares in startups and other small companies. This should be very good for growing companies and for the economy overall, but there’s peril for individual investors -- from scammers likely to be operating in the early days of this new law.
Most concerns hearken back to the Banking Act of 1933, enacted to bring order and regulation to the banking industry during the Great Depression. It was the collapse of the banking industry, not the stock market crash, that did most of the damage during the Depression. Also called the Glass-Steagall Act, it established federal insurance for bank deposits, keeping banks in the savings business and out of investing, leaving the trading to stock brokers and investment banks, which were not allowed to take deposits. Glass-Steagall along with the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 established a regulatory structure that many people thought worked well, until 1999 when parts of Glass-Steagall were repealed by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Sorry for all the legislative history, folks, but you can’t tell the players without a program.
I'm boycotting Apple
Patent bullying and ongoing competition by litigation and intimidation are reasons why. For me the last straw came earlier this week when Apple sought to ban importation of Samsung Galaxy S III (the request for preliminary injunction is before a judge and a ruling could come as early as next week). The phone launched in 28 countries on May 29 and goes on sale from five US carriers within the next 30 days. Many tech reviewers and pundits have called Galaxy S III an iPhone 4S killer. Apple doesn't have a competitive product in market so instead seeks to block Samsung's -- all under the guise of protecting innovations.
Apple is an amazing marketer that manages perceptions very well. One of these regards innovation and the idea that other companies imitate Apple, often badly, and its trendy ideas must be protected. Perception is one thing. Reality is another. Apple isn't as innovative as its corporate "reality distortion field" would have everyone believe. But the company has gotten quite good at something: Unleashing a torrent of suits to secure patents and to defend them -- and many cover processes that should never have been awarded patents in the first place. Apple has gotten quite good at gaming the patent system. I want no part of it.
The 25 worst pins and passwords
At a time when password breaches like the one at LinkedIn are once more making the news, there's plenty of good advice around about how to select a strong password as opposed to the sort of stereotyped easy-to-remember-but-stupendously-easy-to-guess password that turns up again and again in dumped lists of hacked passwords.
So if your favorite, much-used password (or something very like it) is in the following list, it might be a good idea to stop reading this now, go to the link on how to select a strong password and use it as a basis for changing all your passwords to something safer (then come back and think about the PINs you use). The list is abstracted from one compiled by Mark Burnett, representing the most-used passwords in a data set of around 6 million:
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iPhone kills carrier profits
Second in a series. Two days ago, I established that iPhone's market share is heavily dependent on carrier subsidies. Now let's take a look how iPhone subsidies affect carriers and the potential impact this could have on Apple.
To Summarize, under iPhone's current subsidy structure, it is practically impossible for carriers to break-even. Even when factoring higher churn rate of other smartphones and lower cost of retaining iPhone users, Apple's device still costs carriers too much to be really profitable compared to other smartphones. Essentially, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone users subsidize iPhone owners. Carriers make more money from non-iPhone smartphone owners, while raising data and early-termination fees to offset iPhone costs.
Microsoft gives back to Android, but users say 'no thanks'
Thanks to some smart lawyering or perhaps fears CEO Steve Ballmer will show up unannounced, Microsoft has negotiated envious patent fee payments from nearly all major Android licensees. So there's something fitting about the software giant giving a little something back to Android, by way of an exclusive app -- well for now -- on{X}. Or perhaps it's a Trojan Horse to undo Android phones, chopping up performance or draining battery life. Or maybe Microsoft sees Android users as easy beta testers, considering the more rigorous standards for getting into Apple's App Store than Google Play.
One thing is certain: Early on{X} users despise the app, which has some of the worst reviews you'll see at Google Play. As I post, the app has average rating of 1.8 stars out of five. Among the 244 reviewers, 178 give the app a single star. Ouch! I had planned to grab this one, which is available in beta, but skipped after seeing the scathing response.
Nintendo says Wii U will revolutionize the living room, we hope so
The stage is set at the Nokia theater. The large screen in the middle of the stage flickers with the logo of Nintendo before the familiar face of Shigeru Miyamoto, the father of Mario and Zelda, shows up with his pixie-like smile and innocent glee. Nintendo's opening act for today's E3 Expo press conference -- the Wii U update of the Gamecube classic Pikmin in Pikmin 3, setting the tone for the entire presentation.
This conference is about the games first, hardware accessories are a far second thought. The features of the Wii U hardware are only mentioned by Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime, by saying "The Wii U will have YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Video, but you can find out more about the console later, let's do a rundown of the new GamePad and get back to what's important, the games!"
iPhone market share heavily depends on carrier subsidies
First in a series. Recently, there have been some articles stating that carrier subsidies may pose a risk to Apple. But before we accept or reject this assertion at face value, it would be prudent to find out just how much of an impact they have. We can do this by delving into a statistical analysis to isolate the key drivers of the iPhone's country-wise market share. So let's dive right in.
To start off with the analysis, we need to create a shortlist of a few key drivers that could have a major impact on the iPhone's market share. If these inputs do not have much of an impact, then the analysis would show us as much, so this initial shortlist doesn't have any bearing on the actual outcome of the analysis. My shortlist:
Say, iPad idolaters, don't write the laptop's epitaph just yet
May you live in interesting times. It’s an ancient curse. Or is it a blessing? There are volumes devoted to that age-old issue. In my world, though, there’s nothing gray about this topic. I get paid to answer questions, so interesting times are a blessing. Straight up. When clients don’t have any questions, now that’s a curse.
These are blessed times we live in, my friends. At least it is in my world. It’s hard to believe that it’s only been two years since Apple sold the first iPad. The year before, the tech world marveled at the vitality of the PC. Incredibly, shipments grew in 2009, defying gravity at a time when the rest of the economy seemed to be in a free-fall. My, how things have changed.
BetaNews giveaway: One year of premium Safe Shepherd 'Privacy-as-a-Service'
Venture-backed startup Safe Shepherd is a service we can really get behind. Users sign up and enter their personal information (personal names or aliases, email addresses, phone numbers, mailing addresses, etc.) into a profile, and Safe Shepherd locates that information on data broker websites and then erases it.
It helps protect your information against sites like BeenVerified.com, Radaris, Spokeo, and RapLeaf, which scrape whatever data they can find and sell it to marketers, or even worse, to potential identity thieves.
Samsung Series 5 550 Chromebook first-impressions review
Today, Google and Samsung officially launch the second-generation Chromebook, starting with the Series 5 550, which like its predecessor comes in WiFi-only and 3G combo models. I had the pleasure of using the new Chromebook for the past week as my only PC. The overall user experience is surprisingly satisfying and refreshing. In a computer market dominated by Mac and Windows, Chromebook is freedom from duopolies that define the experience within walled gardens and around desktop applications. But changes introduced with Chrome OS 19 make the user experience much more desktop-like, as Google cedes some of the browser motif for familiarity and usability, with multitasking being high among the reasons.
If you read no further, the answer to your question is this: Yes, you can use Chromebook Series 5 550 as your primary, and only, PC. Google has succeeded offering online and offline capabilities balanced to most computing needs, while keeping cloud benefits primary but seamlessly integrated. For two months last summer, I used the original Samsung Series 5 Chromebook as my primary PC, in the first weeks and as my only one later on. I'll repeat the experiment at least through the end of June, and I might not go back -- strange, considering new OS X and Windows versions debut within months. That commitment says much about my positive first impressions.
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